The story
On the Avenue des Arts, part of the ring road around central Brussels, stands a townhouse that the collector Henri Van Cutsem bought in 1890. He hired Victor Horta, the architect later famous as a pioneer of Art Nouveau, to remodel it, and the work was finished in 1893. Horta's main gift to the house was light. Two large skylights still bring daylight down into the ground-floor rooms where pictures hang.
Van Cutsem supported living Belgian artists, among them the sculptor Guillaume Charlier, who became a close friend. When Van Cutsem died in 1904 he left Charlier the house, while his picture collection went to Tournai, to a museum Horta later designed for it. Charlier lived and worked here until his death in 1925 and asked in his will that the house become a public museum. It opened in 1928, and the Brussels municipality of Saint-Josse still runs it.
Inside, the rooms still feel lived in. Paintings by Anna Boch, Léon Frédéric and Eugène Laermans hang beside Empire furniture, Brussels tapestries and a Chinese dining room, with Charlier's own sculptures among them. One small picture to look for is a still life of flowers and butterflies by James Ensor, the Ostend painter, dated 1889.
