Van Buuren Museum

Van Buuren Museum http://museumvanbuuren.be The Van Buuren Museum is a unique, unusual and magical place located in Brussels, Belgium.

Built in 1928, the house of banker and arts patron David van Buuren has an exterior typical of the Amsterdam School. The interior, a tour de force of Art Deco, represents a unique ensemble brought together by renowned decorators from Belgium, France and the Netherlands. The rare furniture, carpets, stained glass, sculpture and paintings by Belgian and international masters from the 16th to the 20t

h century have remained in their original places, giving this museum the intimate character of a private home. The gardens are a masterpiece of landscaping in themselves. At the end of the 1920s, Jules Buyssens conceived the Regular Garden, the Picturesque Garden and the Large Rose Garden in the spirit of Art Deco. In the 1960s, René Pechère created the Labyrinth and the Heart Garden. Thanks to Alice van Buuren, this park is a splendid a place to stroll, reflect and dream.​

28/08/2026

A preserved treasure in the heart of Brussels, where art, heritage and history come together in a truly unique place.

Discover the Van Buuren Museum & Gardens.

Book your visit via the link in bio.
Monday & Wednesday–Friday: 2–5.30 pm
Saturday: 1–5.30 pm
Sunday: 10 am–5.30 pm
Closed on Tuesdays.

Advance booking is required to visit the house.

📍41 Avenue Léo Errera, 1180 Brussels

Only a few weeks left to discover Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne, at the van Buuren Museu...
21/08/2026

Only a few weeks left to discover Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne, at the van Buuren Museum & Gardens.

Two artists that art history kept apart for too long. One from Flanders, one from Hainaut. One rooted in Flemish symbolism, the other in the Walloon expressionist tradition. And yet, once placed in dialogue, the conversation is immediate.

Gustave van de Woestyne (1881–1947) burns his academic work before leaving for Laethem-Saint-Martin in 1900. Nine years there shape everything: the company of Georges Minne, the discovery of the Flemish Primitives in Bruges, a brief attempt at monastic life where he is invited to return to the world and make art his true calling. His brother Karel summed it up in a single line: “Gustave’s art rests on his inner life.” David van Buuren later commissioned several works from him for his home in Uccle. They are still there today.

Anto Carte (1886–1954), the son of a cabinetmaker in Mons, begins drawing classes at the age of eleven. He trains in Brussels, discovers the Italian Primitives in Paris, travels to Italy, and eventually settles in the Brabant countryside. What follows is an art built around the simplest, most universal figures: the sower, the shepherd, the mother, intimate, attentive to humble lives, and quietly spiritual.

Neither belonged to the avant-gardes of their time. Both chose to look back, not out of nostalgia, but out of the conviction that certain questions cross the centuries, and that painting can still answer them.

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne, on view until 27 September 2026.

Included in the price of your museum visit.

Book through the link in bio.

At the van Buuren Museum & Gardens, some details have a way of following you.This geometric motif of interlocking rectan...
16/08/2026

At the van Buuren Museum & Gardens, some details have a way of following you.

This geometric motif of interlocking rectangles appears throughout the house, in the woodwork, balustrades, stained glass and even the radiator covers. Repeated from room to room, it forms part of the museum’s distinctive visual language, creating a subtle dialogue between architecture, decoration and light.

Over time, this recurring motif has become part of the museum’s identity itself, a graphic signature instantly connected to the house and its singular character.

Today, it also lives beyond the walls of the museum.

Reimagined on our tote bag, it offers a way to take a little piece of the van Buuren Museum home with you, a reminder of the details, craftsmanship and atmosphere that make this place so special.

Available at the museum shop.

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne > 27.09.2026, Musée & Jardins van Buuren.Ruralism and the ...
12/08/2026

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne > 27.09.2026, Musée & Jardins van Buuren.

Ruralism and the sacred · the peasant condition

Two ways of reading the land.

Van de Woestyne’s The Rich Peasant and the Poor Peasant (1932) is a late work, painted when the artist had returned to the motifs of Laethem-Saint-Martin. David van Buuren acquired it for his music room alongside the Annunciation in a Landscape of 1933. Two works conceived to speak to each other, still hanging in the same room today.

Carte’s The Hedges (1943) surprises at first glance. What draws the eye is not the horse and rider, nor the thatched farmhouses in the background, but the hedges themselves: precisely clipped into geometric volumes, squares and rectangles fitted together, structuring the space of a Brabant farm with quiet authority. These hedges are the real subject of the painting. They delimit, protect, organise. An hortus conclusus transposed to the scale of a working farm, no longer the medieval garden of the Virgin but a living, inhabited landscape, crossed by a horse and its rider.

What connects both works is an attention to the way land is ordered by human hands, and what that order reveals about our relationship to the world.

Gustave van de Woestyne, Le Paysan riche et le Paysan pauvre, 1932, oil on canvas, 83 x 144,5 cm, van Buuren Museum & Gardens collection.

Anto Carte, Les Haies, 1943, oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, private collection, Céroux-Mousty.

When people think of the van Buuren Museum, they often think of the house. The Art Deco interiors, the carpets, the pain...
09/08/2026

When people think of the van Buuren Museum, they often think of the house. The Art Deco interiors, the carpets, the paintings, the stained glass. But step outside, and a whole other world opens up.

The gardens are not an afterthought. They are half the experience.

Designed in two phases by two of Belgium’s most eminent landscape architects, Jules Buyssens (1872–1958) conceived the first phase in the 1920s, while René Pechère (1908–2002) added his vision in the 1960s.

Together they created six distinct spaces across 1.2 hectares: the Picturesque Garden, the Small Rose Garden, the Grande Roseraie, the Labyrinth, the Heart Garden and the orchard.

Restoration efforts undertaken in three phases between 2010 and 2018 earned the gardens the Europa Nostra Prize in 2015.

In 2023, they became the first Belgian site to join the European Route of Historic Gardens, a cultural itinerary of the Council of Europe.

A house and its gardens, inseparable. Come and discover both.

Book your visit through the link in bio.

04/08/2026

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne > 27.09.2026, Musée & Jardins van Buuren.

Interior garden and spirituality

Two Annunciations. The same moment, the same message. Two entirely different ways of receiving it.

Van de Woestyne sets the scene in the garden of a Flemish farmhouse, a deliberate break with tradition, which usually places the Annunciation indoors. The garden is an *hortus conclusus*, pure and enclosed, where the divine can arrive quietly. The figures are schematic, the palette almost white, the atmosphere closer to a medieval illumination than a painting. Nothing dramatic, just the gentleness of an instant in a farm garden.

Carte’s angel, seen from behind, barefoot, offers Mary a flowering pot plant, a gesture of almost childlike delicacy. Mary appears at an open window, her hand suspended between surprise and stillness. Between them, a stone planter, a twisted tree: the garden has slipped into the scene, both separation and bridge. The silver-blue palette gives the feeling of a waking dream.

In both works, the sacred does not descend into palaces. It arrives where life is ordinary, and quiet, and real.

« Territoires intérieurs » is included in the price of your museum visit. Book through the link in bio.

Gustave van de Woestyne, Annonciation, 1920, oil on cardboard, 48,5 x 58 cm, van Buuren Museum & Gardens collection.

Anto Carte, Annonciation, s.d., lithograph on paper, 44 x 40 cm, private collection, Rhode-Saint-Genèse.

What do you know about the Amsterdam School?The van Buuren house was built between 1924 and 1928 by architects Léon Gova...
01/08/2026

What do you know about the Amsterdam School?

The van Buuren house was built between 1924 and 1928 by architects Léon Govaerts and Alexis Van Vaerenbergh, and it bears the clear influence of this Dutch architectural movement that flourished between roughly 1915 and 1930.

Buildings of the Amsterdam School are characterised by brick construction with complicated masonry, the integration of decorative masonry, art glass, wrought ironwork and integrated architectural sculpture. The aim was to create a total architectural experience, interior and exterior.
The aim was to create a total architectural experience, interior and exterior.

In other words, nothing is purely functional. The brick is also ornament. The window is also sculpture. The house is also a work of art.

Rather than following the path of Art Nouveau, as neighbouring Belgium largely did, the Amsterdam School looked to the craftsmanship traditions of England and the national romanticism of Scandinavia, as well as to their own distinctive brick construction. The result is a style that feels at once grounded and expressive, serious and alive.

Object of desireThe Lampe Boule, designed in 1931 by Félix Aublet (1903–1978), sits in the Cosy Corner with the quiet co...
29/07/2026

Object of desire

The Lampe Boule, designed in 1931 by Félix Aublet (1903–1978), sits in the Cosy Corner with the quiet confidence of something that knows exactly what it is.

A rotating sphere on a tiered wooden base, a tube rising to an adjustable spherical shade. Every element moves, every element is considered.

Aublet was born in Tunis, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and refused to stay within any single discipline. Architect, decorator, colorist, set designer for film and theatre, he was particularly known for his inventive use of metal tubing. In 1935, he showed his work at the Brussels Universal Exhibition.

The kind of object that reminds you why every corner of this house deserves a second look.

26/07/2026

This house was built to be loved.

When David and Alice van Buuren conceived their home in Uccle in the 1920s, every detail was chosen with intention, every object, every carpet, every view onto the garden. What they created was not just a residence but a living work of art, a veritable freeze frame, untouched since the day they left it.

An ambitious multi-year restoration programme is still currently underway, led by architect Barbara Van der Wee and supported by and , working to preserve and enhance this exceptional heritage for future generations.

Heritage does not preserve itself. It takes attention, expertise, and a genuine conviction that what the past has left us is worth carrying forward.

Book your visit through the link in bio.

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne > 27.09.2026, Musée & Jardins van Buuren.Ruralism and the ...
22/07/2026

Territoires intérieurs — Anto Carte & Gustave van de Woestyne > 27.09.2026, Musée & Jardins van Buuren.

Ruralism and the sacred - the peasant condition

Four figures, four gestures. Two sowers, two solitary men, one a shepherd, one a peasant with a red scarf. Painted years apart, by two artists who never set out to answer each other. And yet, hung together in the Black Room, the dialogue is immediate.

The sowers share the same gesture: an arm raised, a hand open, seeds given to the earth. But where Van de Woestyne’s figure is monumental, bathed in golden light, turned away from us like an archetype from another age, Carte’s leans forward, grounded, present, an act of concrete faith rather than offering.

The shepherd and the man with the red scarf are both figures of threshold, standing at the point where the everyday touches something larger. Van de Woestyne’s shepherd fixes a horizon we cannot see, his gaze turned inward. Carte’s peasant looks back at us directly, the single warm note of his scarf anchoring him in the world.

One sublimes. The other anchors. Together, they say something whole.

Gustave van de Woestyne, Le Semeur, 1913, oil on canvas, 68 x 100,5 cm, van Buuren Museum & Gardens collection.

Anto Carte, Le Semeur, 1919, oil on canvas, 90 x 87 cm, private collection, Halle.

Anto Carte, L’homme à l’écharpe rouge, 1941, mixed media on paper, 53 x 56 cm, private collection, Rhode-Saint-Genèse.

Gustave van de Woestyne, Le Berger, 1910, oil on canvas, 73,5 x 55,5 cm, van Buuren Museum & Gardens collection.

Adresse

Avenue Léo Errera 41
Brussels
1180

Heures d'ouverture

Lundi 14:00 - 17:30
Mercredi 14:00 - 17:30
Jeudi 14:00 - 17:30
Vendredi 14:00 - 17:30
Samedi 14:00 - 17:30
Dimanche 14:00 - 17:30

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