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2015 marks the bicentenary of the creation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Between 1815 and 1830, Belgium and the Netherlands were briefly joined under William I. How did this come about and what went wrong?
This new museum in Antwerp tells the story of millions of immigrants in the US. Between 1873 and 1934 the shipping company Red Star Line carried them from Antwerp to New York.
Young and unmarried monarch Charles V conceived a daughter in Oudenaarde, Margaret of Parma. In that 16th century Oudenaarde was a prosperous city, known for splendid tapestries. Today it dreams near the river Scheldt, invaded by cyclists ...
One hundred years ago, the treaty that would finally end World War I was signed in Versailles. A frustrating experience for war-battered Belgium.
The Treaty of London of 19 April 1839 meant the definitive international recognition of Belgium's independence.
About the etcher Jules de Bruycker, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work held in his home town Ghent in 1995.
On May 8 2008 the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) will have existed for 200 years. To celebrate this, a large number of events have been organised in the course of the year on the theme of “The Magic of Science”. The a...
Ask the average art-lover to name the most important seventeenth-century Flemish artists and it’s quite unlikely that Adriaen Brouwer will rarely figure in the list, even though he undoubtedly belongs there. His contemporaries admired his ...
Those musicians people can recognize after only hearing a couple of notes are few and far between. Only the truly great are endowed with that power. Toots Thielemans was one of them. According to connoisseurs he was, after Jacques Brel, pr...
The renovation of the Museum for Fine Arts in Antwerp will take at least six years, and it is hoped that it will be able to reopen in 2017. Although the museum is closed at present, the collection is still accessible. Some 600 works are tra...
Three Flemish cities, Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven all have a new museum. They show three different ways of tackling a project. In each case, existing old collections are given a new, engaging presentation.
'Vlaamsekunstcollectie', written as one word and meaning literally ‘Flemish art collection', is a new name for a collaborative project involving the three most important art history museums in Flanders: those of Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. T...
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 marked the beginning of difficult times for the majority of the Belgian population. Seven million Belgians were threatened with starvation. A handful of politicians and business people trie...
In 1980 the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium signed a treaty which officially recognised that Dutch was the common language of the Dutch and the Flemish. This treaty also provided for the founding of a body to develop t...
Cold and hunger played a major role at the end of the the Second World War. The Battle of the Bulge still fires the imagination. Heroic combat encounters, in exceptionally bad climatic conditions, have given rise to many stories and myths, ...
In 2004 the Rubens-lover is to be pampered by a plethora of exhibitions in both Europe and America. In short: anyone who fails to visit a Rubens exhibition in 2004 is either living on another planet or is a real Rubens-hater; and for the la...
About the bible translator whose life ended at the stake in Vilvoorde. An exhibition in Antwerp (with an interesting catalogue) paid a fitting tribute to a relatively little-known man who made an important contribution to the formation of t...
The Fleming Peter Piot has headed UNAIDS since 1996. This article describes his efforts to set in motion a worldwide campaign against Aids.
In its twenty years of existence the Flemish cultural centre De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam has evolved into the first port of call for anyone in the Netherlands who is interested in Flemish culture. It is no Flemish cultural reservation but ...
In its 100 years of history this museum has developed from a typical colonial institute into a museum and study centre where people from all over the world carry out research.
Review of 'Dance in Flanders' (Bruges, 1997)
The image of the world that the Flemish cartographer Mercator, whose death was commemorated in 1994, created with his work was not improved upon until the 18th century.
At the beginning of the 1990s Dutch literature started getting some relative success abroad. This was obviously due primarily to the quality of the books. But we can also state that the policies promoting translations in the Netherlands and...
