Travel Belgium About Brussels Upper Town Musees Royaux Des Beaux Arts
Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; ¬5. Métro: Trône .
A few metres from place Royale, at the start of rue de la Régence, the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts comprise two museums, one displaying modern art, the other older works. Together they make up Belgium's most satisfying, all-round collection of fine art, with marvellous collections of work by - amongst many - Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rubens and the surrealists Paul Delvaux and René Magritte.
Both museums are large, and to do them justice you should see them in separate visits. Finding your way around is made easy by the detailed English-language
museum plan issued with admission. The older paintings - up to the beginning of the nineteenth century - are exhibited in the Musée d'Art Ancien , where the
blue area shows paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the Bruegels, and the brown area concentrates on paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the collection of Rubens (for which the museum is internationally famous) as the highlight. The
orange area comprises the small and undistinguished Gallery of Sculptures. The Musée d'Art Moderne has a
yellow area devoted to nineteeth-century works, notably the canvases of Ostend-born James Ensor, and a
green area, whose eight subterranean levels cover the twentieth century.
The Musée d'Art Ancien also hosts, in the red area, a prestigious programme of
temporary exhibitions . A supplementary admission fee is usually payable and for the most popular you'll need to buy a ticket ahead of time; the ticket may specify the time of admission. The larger exhibitions may cause some disruption to the permanent collection, so treat the room numbers we've given with a little caution. Inevitably, the account we give just scratches the surface; the museum's bookshop sells a wide range of detailed texts including a well-illustrated guide to the collections for ¬14.75.
