Look for the narrow pale stone façade with tall rectangular windows and a simple entrance marked by the museum’s own name.
Museum De Reede is a rather unusual creature in Antwerp: a private museum that keeps a gallery’s modest scale, yet thinks like a serious museum. Dutch collector Harry Rutten opened it in twenty seventeen, after a life spent not in art schools but in shipping and oil trading. He collected, as he put it, simply what moved him or troubled him. That instinct led him to graphic art, work on paper that many museums own in abundance but show only rarely, because prints and drawings are delicate and spend much of their lives in storage.
Rutten tested the waters first. In two thousand and six, parts of his collection travelled to the Charlier Museum in Brussels, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, and to the Haugar Vestfold Art Museum in Tønsberg, Norway. Together, those exhibitions drew around one hundred thousand visitors. That success convinced him the collection deserved a permanent home. He also preferred independence; after poor experiences with loans, donations, and museum management, he chose to open his own museum instead.
Inside, the focus is strikingly clear. The collection centres on Francisco Goya, Edvard Munch, and Félicien Rops: thirty-two lithographs by Munch, thirty-seven etchings by Rops, and an astonishing one hundred and forty etchings by Goya. An etching, by the way, is a print made from a metal plate that an artist bites with acid and then inks. Goya’s great series appear here, including Los Caprichos, Los Disparates, Tauromaquia, and Los Desastres de la Guerra, his blunt, unsparing vision of war’s cruelty. Across all three artists runs the same thread: human weakness, human fate, and a sharp, often uncomfortable critique of society.
Antwerp suits this museum beautifully, because this city has a long printmaking tradition, from Plantin and Moretus to the famous meeting in fifteen twenty-one between Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, when the two masters exchanged etched plates like scholars trading ideas.
If you want to go in later, it usually opens from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and stays closed from Tuesday to Thursday.
This is a small museum with a surprisingly fierce soul. When you are ready, continue on toward Saint Walburga’s Church.
