Belfius Art Collection

On the 32nd floor of the Belfius Tower, above Place Rogier in Brussels, the Belgian bank Belfius shows its art collection. The Belfius Art Gallery is primarily a corporate collection with a public window, open on selected Saturdays while an exhibition is running.

Its more than 4,300 works were pooled as banks merged. Crédit Communal de Belgique and Paribas Banque Belgique started buying after the Second World War to keep Belgian heritage in the country, and BACOB added its own collection from 1980. The range runs from Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries to Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers and Luc Tuymans.

The best-known old pictures are two oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Sabine Women and The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines. In 1639 Philip IV of Spain ordered large canvases for a new hall in the Alcázar, his palace in Madrid, and Rubens was still working on them when he died in May 1640. The finished paintings were lost when the Alcázar burned in 1734. The sketches survived, and one of the bank's predecessors bought them in 1969.