The story
The Museum of Fine Arts in Tournai is the only museum the Belgian architect Victor Horta ever designed, and he built it around a gift. In 1904 the Brussels collector Henri Van Cutsem left his paintings to the city, and Horta, the master of Art Nouveau, laid out a plan of white galleries radiating from a central hall like the petals of a flower, lit from above.
Van Cutsem's taste ran to 19th-century French painting, so a small Belgian town ended up with the only two works by Édouard Manet on public view in Belgium, alongside pieces by Monet and Seurat. The building opened in 1928, a few years after Horta finished the drawings.
The other reason to come is a homecoming. Rogier van der Weyden, one of the great Flemish painters of the 1400s, was born in Tournai, and the museum shows a small Virgin and Child attributed to him, so the town's most famous son hangs a short walk from where he started.
