The story
The University of Liège owns paintings by James Ensor, the Ostend painter of masks and carnival crowds. They came in 1977 with the bequest of a collector named Pisart, decades after the core of its art collection had arrived.
That core was the gift of Baron Adrien Wittert, a collector of books and prints, who left his collection to the Belgian state in 1903. It held some 20,000 volumes, among them 117 manuscripts and many early printed books, along with about 25,000 drawings and prints, and the state placed it with the university. Paper is still the museum's strength. Of more than 65,000 objects, over 51,000 are drawings and prints, with Rembrandt's etchings, Dürer's woodcut Apocalypse and prints after designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder among them.
The Musée Wittert sits inside the university's main building on the Place du 20-Août. After a renovation in 2018 it dropped its old name, Galerie Wittert, and now shows its holdings in a semi-permanent display that changes every four years, alternating with temporary exhibitions.
