The poem Musée des Beaux Arts, written by W. H. Auden after a visit to this gallery, is a hymn of praise to old masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, famous for capturing daily life with wonderful realism. That was in 1938, when the museum occupied a former royal palace in the Belgian capital.
Today the palace holds the Ancient Art Collection, while a new building houses work from the 18th century on, including a room devoted to local Surrealist René Magritte. The whole collection is one of the finest of its kind.
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (French: Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Dutch: Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België) are a group of art museums in Brussels, Belgium. They include six museums: the Oldmasters Museum, the Magritte Museum, the Fin-de-Siècle Museum, the Modern Museum, the Antoine Wiertz Museum and the Constantin Meunier Museum.
The Royal Museums contains over 20,000 drawings, sculptures, and paintings, covering a period extending from the early 15th century to the present, such as those of Flemish old masters like Bruegel, Rogier van der Weyden, Robert Campin, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and Peter Paul Rubens, making it the most popular art institution and most visited museum complex in Belgium. The Magritte Museum houses the world’s largest collection of the works of the surrealist René Magritte. Wikipedia