Address: Somewhere in Gent
Co-ordinates: private.
Open: It isn’t.
Parking: None
How to get there by public transport: I have been asked not to say.
How good is it? Amazing. Smaller in scale than Modave or Park Abbey, but that makes it all the more intimate.
Date of my visit: 5 February 2022

One of Hansche’s most spectacular ceilings is in the Brouwershuis, the former headquarters of the brewers’ guild, in Gent. It has had a chequered history, serving at one time as a workshop for carriages and also as a perfume factory, so it’s amazing that the stuccos have survived. It’s now a private home, and the owner allowed me to look at it, but asked me not to take any photographs. Out of respect for their privacy I am not giving any further details of its location, and please do not try and track them down from here.

Other photographs and images are available. This sketch, an 1864 etching by Armand Heins from a sketch by C. Tfelt, shows the elaborate detail of the ceiling, and I am snipping from it to show each panel in turn.

There are five panels. From left to right, we have instruments of the brewery and the artist’s signature:

Then we have Hercules smiting the Hydra and the Lernaean Lion. The Hydra has fewer heads than the one in Modave, but it’s a more ambitiously three-dimensional tableau.

The central panel, showing the fall of Phaethon, is simply incredible.

This photograph from the Gent city archive captures it from below – Phaethon and the horses of the Sun, desperately tumbling in different directions. Phaethon’s reins are ironwork rather than plaster.

However, this cannot capture the full intensity of being in a relatively small space with this incredible three-dimensional sculpture immediately above you. Jan Verlinde’s photograph, from the 1995 book Flanders: The Art of Living by Piet Swimberghe, gives you a sense of the scale; the figures extend a good 70 cm out of the ceiling.

One of the lost panels in Kleve was of the same subject and may have been on the same scale.

Next we have Hercules seizing the belt of Hippolyta, leader of the Amazons, and wrestling the Cretan Bull to the ground.

I have to say that the Amazons don’t look much like women do in real life. And what is that head-dress?

The fifth panel shows Hercules killing the dragon that guards the golden apples of Hesperides with a single arrow. His bow, like Phaethon’s reins, is ironwork rather than plaster. His arm and the dragon’s head, and the bow, are all in our space. The dragon’s tongue is slightly tinted red even after all these years. It’s really striking.

One wonders how many other houses, like the Brouwershuis and its former neighbour the Canfyn house, also in Gent, once boasted similar ceilings by Hansche. We must have lost the majority of his work over the ages.