One of my best / worst habits is not reading about museums before I visit. I turn up in the hope that there will be something interesting there, based on the name alone.

Thus it was for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi, Belgium. I knew that Charleroi was 1) the location of a Ryanair airport and 2) a formerly industrial city. Many remnants of that industry can still be seen on the train as you approach the city.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi. I found a lovely museum in a stunning building with a fascinating collection.

The museum is housed in a long brick building. The interior is bright gallery-white, over two floors. Concrete fonts ran along one side of the ground floor. Those, coupled with concrete pillars, led me to think that the building was once a church. I asked, but no - it had been the stables for horses for a nearby barracks. Those concrete fonts must have been for feed, not baptisms!

It was a sunny day when I visited, with light streaming into some of the galleries. The windows had been treated to allow this without damaging the artworks, giving a bright and beautiful feel to the museum and showing off the collections well.

The city’s industrial heritage was reflected in the paintings in the museum, with landscapes depicting the realities and brutal beauty of that world.

Pierre Paulus was a Belgian painter, working in an expressionist style. He loved to paint the industrial landscapes of the Sambre Valley, where he had grown up. Like these paintings, he depicted mines, factories and furnaces.

The museum also featured more contemporary artworks with a room dedicated to art by artists born in Charleroi, such as this by Daniel Fauville.

It was not all work and no play in the collections. This painting below depicts the carnival in Binche, a small city in Belgium with around 33,000 inhabitants. This festival before Lent is one of the best-known in Belgium, dating back to the 14th century. The celebrations in Binche were so lively and indulgent that the town has given the word ‘binge’ to the English language.

This painting In June was by Belgian painter Anna Boch, who was active in the late 19th century. Her family were connected to the Villeroy & Boch ceramics company. Anna Boch is believed to be the only person to have bought a painting by Vincent Van Gogh during his lifetime.

The collection also included several surrealist paintings, well described by the labels as artworks that mix two familiar elements for unusual effect. This painting is by the Belgian artist René Magritte, who was born in Lessines, around 50km away from Charleroi.

Thank you for reading + until next time,