Tournai’s Fine Arts Museum

 

About 15 minutes by car. Tournai’s Museum of Fine Arts is recognised as an exceptional heritage of Wallonia and is the only museum ever designed as such by the architect Victor Horta.

The great master of Art Nouveau deliberately built the edifice in the shape of a turtle. Indeed, in the wake of the theft of the Mona Lisa, Horta designed his museum to tackle security problems in museums. A guard is able to keep a panoramic watch on the rooms: standing in the centre of the museum, he can observe all the rooms surrounding him.

The collections include works by great Flemish primitives such as Jan Mabuse, Robert Campin, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and others. Great painters of the 17th and 18th centuries are also well represented, and visitors can admire pieces by Peter Paul Rubens. The impressionists and post-impressionists artists represented include Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, etc.

Last but not least, you will be interested to know that the museum is the only one in Belgium to have works by Édouard Manet in its collections.