Magritte Museum

The world's largest collection of René Magritte's surrealist paintings

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts on the Place Royale contain the world's largest permanent collection of works by René Magritte — over two hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures spread across three floors of a purpose-designed space within the larger museum complex. The collection covers his entire career, from the early Impressionist-influenced work through his mature surrealist period and the later Vacheism phase.

Magritte was Belgian through and through and spent most of his working life in Brussels, which makes the museum feel appropriate rather than merely convenient. The famous paintings — the man in the bowler hat, the sky of birds and leaves, the pipe that is not a pipe — are here alongside less familiar work that rewards slower attention. Tickets include access to the Fin-de-Siècle Museum and the Old Masters collection in the adjacent buildings. The combined ticket is worth taking.

things to do museum royaldistrict
A story
Magritte lived in Brussels for most of his adult life, the last twenty-four years in the same modest terraced house in Jette — now the Magritte House museum. Despite becoming internationally famous, he never moved somewhere grander. He painted in his dining room, using the same bowler hat as a prop for decades, and his wife Georgette is thought to have been the model for many of his figures.