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The War Heritage Institute manages a network of exceptional military heritage sites all over Belgium. Among them is the Royal Military Museum in Brussels that houses an art collection illustrating the many aspects of Belgian military history, including 10.000 objects dating from the fifteenth-century to the present day. The emphasis of the collection is placed on the Napoleonic period, the Belgian Revolution and the two World Wars. As a public service the museum also conducts scholarly and scientific research into the collection.

Works made before 1750 include a series of engraved portraits of sixteenth-century French notables . The print depository preserves a number of fencing scenes from the seventeenth-century including those from Girard Thibault’s Académie de l’Espée published in Leiden in 1630 and engraved by sixteen Flemish engravers. Also noteworthy are the engravings after Adam Frans van der Meulen refering to the Dutch War or the Habsburg Netherlands, such as one by Frans van den Wijngaerde,

Also in the art collections are original drawings from Winand Aerts and paintings from Jules van Imschoot referring to the Brabant Revolution at the end of the eighteenth-century. Aerts and Van Imschoot made their works of art decades after the events of the Revolution.

Vera Bras, Curator (January 2022)