With pre-pandemic Eurostar tickets to use (or lose) we decided to go with our original plan and spend a few days in Brussels, somewhere neither of us had been before. It was the old city and Art Nouveau architecture that interested us and a well-placed holiday apartment put us in walking distance of all we wanted to see. As a retired architect, my husband always has a useful plan for what to see and where (I have the plan for where to eat and relax!) so we explored old Brussels in some depth over three days. Street after street offers up extraordinary examples of very early 20th century houses and Art Nouveau design; wonderfully decorative windows, verandahs and doorways, usually with three or four floors and, clearly, high ceilinged, grand rooms on the ground floor. At some point, I’d love to try and incorporate these very individual shapes into my art.

An important architect of the time was Victor Horta and we visited the home and workshop he built for himself between 1898 and 1901. Within 20 years, Art Nouveau was going out of fashion, Horta moved elsewhere and the house was only saved from destruction and fully restored when it was bought by the municipality of St Gilles after a campaign by one of Horta’s former students. Thank goodness - because it is fascinating and gorgeous!

Unfortunately photography is not allowed inside the building but here’s the front door - and a few other windows and verandahs that caught my eye whilst we explored.  

On our last day we visited the Magritte Museum; three floors of his work and accompanying information about the key moments in his life. I knew very little about the artist other than, like many people, recognising ‘The Son of Man’, his surrealist self portrait of 1964. I found many of the works pretty bleak, and this wasn’t helped by the introduction as we entered the gallery which told us that his mother had drowned herself when he was 16 years old. I just kept seeing this trauma in his paintings. Water features in several paintings, including in the background of Son of Man.

           The Son of Man (1964)                                              'The Weariness of Life' (1927)

                                                                     ‘Memory’ (1948)

And not forgetting I headlined this to include ‘Spring sunshine’. It had been such a cold Spring in the UK so a residing memory of Brussels during that mid-May visit was experiencing our first really warm sun; that wonderful moment when you can stop at a café, feel warmth from the sun and enjoy just sitting outside watching the city go about its usual business.