October 9th, 2004 by alephnaught
Antwerp
We got up and had a good breakfast and then took a cab to the main art museum, the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. This is a must see museum, as they have some very famous works. The most interesting painting in my opinion was the Virgin and the Child by Jean Fouquet. Fouquet has few surviving works – this one in particular is almost surrealistic in its use of coloration and use of broad geometric shapes for the figure of the Virgin.
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| The facace of the Koninkijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten | The room just past admission is painted in murals with a huge skylight |
A column inside the museum
Ticket for the museum – there are various front
faces based on works from the collection
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| Aviva in the entryway with a sculpture | The Virgin and the Child by Fouquet |
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| Madonna at the Fountain by Jan van Eyck | |
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| A painting we liked (didn’t get the artist’s name) |
The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Frans Floris |
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| A detail from the painting above | |
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| A painting we liked (didn’t get the artist’s name) |
Another detail from the painting above |
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| Eve by Lucas Cranach | Judith by Jan Metsus |
We walked around and ended up at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh. They had a work by a son of Bosch but photos weren’t allowed and they didn’t have a postcard of that one, but it was worth the visit. I notice a lot of similarity between the fantastic works of Bruegel and Bosch.
Ticket for access to the collection
Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel the elder
We tried to get into the main cathedral, O.-L.-Vrouwekathedraal, but it closes at 3P and we were 15 minutes late.
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| The entrance to the main cathedral in Antwerp | A detail from the facade |
We walked across the old market square, Grote Markt.
A building on the old market square
Row houses along the old market
We walked around to the Sint Pauluskerk. The woman working behind the desk at our hotel had suggested this church as one worth visiting for its interior.
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| The main facade | A sculpture area off the main entrance |
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| Four busts from inside the church – note the relics in glass under each bust | |
We took a train to Brugge – it took about 1 hour, 20 minutes to get there. The hotel was average, the Best Western Premier Hotel Navarra; it was named after the consulate for Spanish Navarra that occupied the building before the hotel.
Two views of the Antwerp Centraal train station
Our train ticket to Brugge
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+Bob Hays
- I'm a father and husband, have two schipperkes, like to read, compose music, travel. And I manage a couple software development teams at DIRECTV.
English
10:15 am on October 20th, 2009
Hello. I’m very interested in the portrait of the Virgin and Child by Jean Fouquet. I am currently an Art History student at URI. I’m writing a paper on this painting, and I have a question for you. Does the museum let the viewer of this painting know that it is the right panel of a diptych? In other words, is the painting displayed with information about the history of this painting? The companion panel of this painting is hanging in a museum in Berlin. Does the curator of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten let the viewer know this? Is there some kind of facsimile of the left panel of this diptych, known as the Melun Diptych, adjacent to the Virgin and Child? The left panel is Etienne Chevalier and Saint Stephen. I have now contacted the Koninklijk Museum by email twice with this question, but no one has responded. I would appreciate any information that you can give to me, and thank you in advance.
Elizabeth Bell Carroll
ivory.tower@verizon.net
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7:32 am on June 3rd, 2010
[…] Child, by Jean Fouquet. The painting is a the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, and I remember clearly visiting it; I looked at it for a while adn then went to get Aviva – she stood with her mouth open a good […]
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