The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (MRBAB) are inaugurating a new thematic room in which a work by Alfred Stevens, Portrait de Camille Lemonnier dans dans l’atelier de l’artiste, acquired by the King Baudouin Foundation, will have place of honour.

Alfred Stevens’s painting Portrait de Camille Lemonnier dans l’atelier de l’artiste, acquired by the King Baudouin Foundation, has been entrusted to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.

This portrait of the Belgian writer Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913) is part of a remarkable series of works by Alfred Stevens on the theme of the painter’s studio. Here, the writer stands reading in front of the window of the painter’s studio, which is represented as the archetypal artist’s studio, such as might be seen in France at the end of the nineteenth century.

The new exhibition room is situated at level -6. Prior to the recent decision to integrate it as part of the definitive circuit of the Musée Fin-de-Siècle, the room had been used for a series of pioneering dossier exhibitions. From now on, it will bring together works on the theme of the Studio, Academicism and Creation. Paintings and sculptures will illustrate scenes of artists’ studios and portraits – self-portraits and others – as well as works that are representative of the artists’ output. Some of the works will illustrate the ‘official’ academicism that developed alongside the avant-garde.