A pair of merged seventeenth-century townhouses where the wealthy mayor Nicolaas Rockox and the still-life painter Frans Snijders once lived as neighbours. The houses have been restored to their seventeenth-century appearance and used as a setting for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts collection while the main museum was closed — works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Snijders, Bruegel the Younger, and others, hung in rooms with period furniture exactly as a collector of the time would have displayed them.
It is one of the most informative small museums in the city — better than the new big museum spaces at giving a sense of how art was actually used by patrons and collectors in the Golden Age. Allow ninety minutes. Closed Mondays.