David Teniers the Younger asked the King of Spain for a charter, and got one. Nearly a century and a half later Napoleon gave the school an empty monastery, and it is still in it.
At a glance
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp is one of the oldest art academies in Europe. It was founded in 1663 by the painter David Teniers the Younger, who had petitioned Philip IV of Spain for a royal charter. Since the Napoleonic decree of 1810 it has occupied the vacant Franciscan friary in the Mutsaardstraat, where it remains today as part of the AP School of Arts.
Key facts
- Founded: 1663, by David Teniers the Younger
- Charter: petitioned from Philip IV of Spain
- The building: a former Franciscan (Friars Minor) friary
- Installed there: by Napoleon’s imperial decree of 5 May 1810, which also founded the Antwerp museum; one account dates the move itself to 1811
- Address: Mutsaardstraat 31, Antwerp
- Today: part of the AP School of Arts; the friary church and part of the convent serve as public galleries
- GPS: 51.2233, 4.4074 · Open in Google Maps
History
Antwerp had been a city of painters for a century and a half before it had an academy. The Guild of Saint Luke trained apprentices in workshops; what it did not do was teach drawing from the model in an organised school. In 1663 David Teniers the Younger, court painter and dealer, petitioned Philip IV of Spain for a charter, and the academy was founded.
Its home came from a different kind of authority. The French suppressed the religious houses, and Napoleon’s imperial decree of 5 May 1810 founded a museum in Antwerp and installed the academy, with its collection, in the empty Franciscan friary in the Mutsaardstraat. One account puts the actual move the following year.
The collection it was given there grew into the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which eventually moved to a building of its own. The academy stayed. It is now part of the AP School of Arts, and the friary church and part of the convent are used as public galleries.
Who is there now
The academy still teaches fine art here, and is best known abroad for its fashion department, whose graduates reshaped European fashion from the 1980s onwards. The buildings are a working art school, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions around the medieval core.
What you see
The remains of the friary church and the convent building form the core of the complex, with later ranges added around them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result is a city block that reads as neither purely monastic nor purely academic: a convent plan carrying two hundred years of school use.
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We have not found a freely licensed photograph of these buildings that we may publish. If you hold one — or if you are at the academy and can send one — we will add it to this page with the credit you ask for, as the opening image or in a gallery.
Sources & resources
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