We took a quick break to Antwerp last weekend, with the aim of looking at several of the museums there, though the Rubenshuis is closed until September. Unfortunately I had a dental emergency after we had visited the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (generally known as KMSKA) and we had to cut our trip short. But what we saw, we liked.
I was fascinated to learn that one of the KMSKA donors was Marie Bonaparte Wyse (1831-1902), born in Waterford to a niece of Napoleon’s and her English soldier lover; a notable hostess of Parisian literary salons, a novelist and journalist whose second husband was prime minister of Italy twice. The KMSKA keeps her bust and a portrait in a room dedicated to its donors; slightly in a corner, I felt, for such a remarkable woman.
The KMSKA has a ground floor of Old Masters and an upper floor of moderns, including James Ensor, and we took a good two and a half hours over it. I took a few photos but where the museum itself has made a better image available online, I’m using that.
Going into the museum you’re pretty much confronted with Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi. There’s a lot of Rubens elsewhere in Antwerp, and indeed there are a lot of Adorations of the Magi by Rubens, but KMSKA lucked out with this one – which is also the subject of a Suske en Wiske comic that I read many years ago.
My eye was also caught by a couple of lesser known pieces among the Old Masters. This is an Annunciation in the style of Rogier van der Weyden, but probably by one of his followers, dating from the 1400s. It’s actually really small, possibly larger on your screen than it is in real life, and I loved the fine detail, including the glimpse of landscape through the window and the vase in the foreground.
The Tower of Babel is a well-known topic, and the more famous versions are by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But his son Jan Brueghel the Elder did one too, somewhat in his father’s shadow; a river flowing past it, and a tunnel leading to it, with human figures running around organising things in the foreground.
Sticking with the family, I also loved Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Census at Bethlehem – this is a copy of his father’s well-known painting, though art historians think he was working from his father’s sketch book rather than from the painting itself./i
Moving forward in time, I was glad to see Theo van Rysselberghe represented; he is one of my favourite fin de siècle Belgian artists. This is a pointillist portrait of 23-year-old Marie Sèthe, a Frenchwoman and student of van Rysselberghe’s who was about to marry Belgian artist Henry van de Velde. French Wikipedia has a really interesting article about her links with William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley, and how she has been erased from art history.
At least Marie Sèthe is generally referred to by her own name in descriptions of this painting. Another of van Rysselberghe’s subjects, also married to one of his fellow artist friends, is simply referred to as “Mme Constantin Meunier”. With some effort, I tracked down her real name which was the rather lovely Léocadie Gorneaux, but she seems to have been even more erased from history than Marie Sèthe. This is from before van Rysselberghe’s pointillist period, but I think it’s a great portrait all the same.
And we have no name at all for Léon Frédéric’s nude model, who is visibly embarrassed that she is going to be preserved in full glory for the centuries; I found this a really striking painting. Its title is “Pudeur” in French, “Schroom” in Dutch, parsed as “Timidity” in the museum’s English translation though I’d have gone for “Modesty”, with overtones of reluctance and hesitation.
There are a couple of more recent artists whose style is less naturalistic and who caught my attention. Here’s James Ensor (KMSKA claims to have more art by him than anywhere else), with a bowl of azaleas:
Marc Chagall has a cat at his window:
And finally for now, Jan Brusselmans loves the colours and geometry and light in the Pajottenland, the area immediately west of Brussels.
Anyway, well worth the journey, even if the journey was curtailed.
Other Antwerp notes:
We stayed at the Leonardo Hotel near the station at De Keyserlei 59, in a room at the back looking onto the Queen Astridplein. No air conditioning, and when we opened a window to avoid suffocating, the noise from the square was pretty loud. Would not really recommend, though bed and breakfast were decent enough.
Nice Asian food, Malaysian dinner at the Kuala Lumpur, Statiestraat 10, on the first night and Japanese lunch at Umi Sushi, Groenplaats 8, before my dental problems became unignorable.
I would also add that thanks to the Belgian health system, my dental emergency was dealt with briskly and efficiently by the duty dentist in our municipality, who looked about 15 but clearly knows her stuff. She did the job for €102, of which €92.50 has already been refunded through the insurance system.