CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Musea Brugge

Information

Musea Brugge is a highly diverse group of thirteen museum locations with a collection of visual arts and cultural heritage. Two hundred years of amassing artworks have yielded a superb collection of international significance with masterpieces that are etched into the memories of millions of people. In addition, with over 75,000 objects, the collection is extremely varied: it ranges from Flemish Primitives to contemporary art, from classical fine arts to archaeological finds and objects from everyday life, from majestic tapestries to refined lacework, from sturdy items of furniture to fragile porcelain, glassware and silverwork. This diversity is the greatest asset of Musea Brugge. The collection provides an inexhaustible fountain of new stories to be told to very different kinds of visitors and ample source material to inspire researchers and artists.

The vast majority of the objects are closely linked to the history of Bruges: as a medieval trading metropolis and a European cradle of art and culture, as a city of refined craftsmanship, as a neo-Gothic city and an international destination for cultural tourism. Strikingly, many of the objects are still located in the city or even in the very place for which they were made. This makes Musea Brugge unique. You can admire works by masters such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and other Flemish artists in the context where they were created.

Seven of these locations hold significant collections of Dutch and Flemish art from 1350 to ca. 1800, these are the Groeningemuseum, Prentenkabinet (Bruges Print Room), Sint-Janshospitaal, Gruuthusemuseum, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Museum of the Church of Our Lady), Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Potterie (Our Lady of the Pottery) and Brugse Vrije (Liberty of Bruges).

Collection catalogues

Catalogus schilderijen 17de en 18de eeuw
Vlieghe, Hans
Brugge 1994

Stedelijke Musea Brugge: Steinmetzkabinet: catalogus van de tekeningen
Van de Velde, Carl
Brugge 1984

Catalogus schilderijen 15de en 16de eeuw
De Vos, Dirk
Brugge 1979

Related CODART publications

Sarah van Ooteghem and Evelien de Wilde, “Crowdsourcing as an Aid in Collection Registration: A Case Study from Bruges”, CODARTfeatures, March 2021.

Virginie D’haene, “Bruges Artists Abroad: Neoclassicist Drawings in the Printroom of the Groeningemuseum”, CODARTfeatures, June 2014.

Previous events since 1999


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