The enjoyable Musée Charlier , at avenue des Arts 16, just off the petit ring near place Madou, illustrates the artistic tastes of Belgium's upper middle class at the end of the nineteenth century. It holds the collection of Henri van Cutsem, a wealthy businessman who bought two adjacent properties here in 1890. Cutsem merged and modified the two buildings so that he could display his collection to best effect, even going to the trouble of having Victor Horta install glass roofs. He subsequently bequeathed the house and its contents to a sculptor he knew and
admired, Guillaume Charlier (1854-1925). Charlier kept the collection pretty much intact and it includes a wide range of fine and applied arts, from Belgian tapestries and antique French furniture to Chinese porcelain and paintings by a number of lesser-known Belgian artists.
Each of the dozen or so rooms is crammed with artefacts, and it's this jumbled diversity which is the museum's principal charm. Nevertheless, in the Concert Room it's still worth tracking down
James Ensor's Flowers and Butterflies , and Eugene Laermans' The Promenade , showing peasants out walking.
