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Magritte at the Brussels Royal Fine Art Museums

Although Magritte painted all of his works in Brussels, starting in the 1920s, they retain undeniable traces of the painter's childhood in the Walloon Province of Hainaut: all the critics agree that his veiled faces painted in 1928 recall the face of his mother, who was found drowned in 1912 with her night-dress covering her face. At that time, the family were living in an Art Nouveau-style house built by his father near Charleroi, which has survived intact and which can be visited.

A few months after the shock of his mother's death, Magritte was sent to stay with his father's mother at Soignies. Near her house was an old cemetery which had become an unusually charming park, still a favourite with local lovers of peace and quiet. It was in this park that he met Emilie. She was 15 and he was 14. Later, he recalled: "When I was a child I used to like to play with a girl in the old disused cemetery in a small country town. Together we explored the underground vaults...and we came out into the daylight where an artist from Brussels was painting on one of the paths between the graves...the art of painting was a sort of magic to me, and the artist seemed to be imbued with supernatural powers."

It was in the same cemetery that his grandmother told him the story of a strange former tenant of hers who had asked to be buried with his bowler hat...

Once established in Brussels, Magritte retained his family links with the Wallonia of his childhood and enjoyed its evocation in the poems of his friend, the poet Scutenaire. He made several trips to visit his wife's family near Charleroi.

However, the main reason for him to visit Southern Belgium were events organised by the Surrealists at La Louvière and Mons. Here he met the poet Achille Chavée, the artist Armand Simon, whose many drawings depict the unfathomable twists of the unconscious mind and today can be found in the collections of the BAM in Mons and the Province of Hainaut, and the photographer Marcel Lefrancq, whose work today fills one of the rooms in the Museum of Photography in Charleroi. His little-known photographs form a microcosm of the different trends in Surrealist photography in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1957, Magritte painted a oil painting on canvas for Charleroi's Palais des Beaux-Arts, entitled "La Fée ignorante" ("The Ignorant Fairy") which now hangs in the Conference Hall. It measures 52 cm by 330 cm and brings together several of Magritte's favourite features, including a bust of a woman who appears to have been turned to stone, with a pigeon on its shoulder in the centre of the canvas. In the background are trees and leaves, fish, a ripped-open tree-trunk with powerful roots, a leafy cloud and an odd, trembling house in mysterious surroundings.

Due to its popularity, (20,000 visitors after two weeks), it is strongly advised to book in advance online www.musee-magritte-museum.be > INFO > online tickets.

Our special recommandations