Harry Rutten, a Dutch former shipowner, opened Museum De Reede at Ernest Van Dijckkaai 7 in June 2017, on the quay opposite Het Steen, the castle on the Scheldt. It shows one thing only: graphic art. Etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, engravings and drawings, from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, on two floors of a building on the site of a shipping company’s old offices. The collection is Rutten’s own, placed in a Belgian foundation that runs the museum without a cent of subsidy.

“Grafiek is de kunst van de arme man,” Rutten told VRT NWS in April 2021: printmaking is the poor man’s art. He meant it as a programme. “Het is hier geen exclusieve aangelegenheid,” he went on. “Dit is kunst voor iedereen.” Art for everyone, and his advice on how to look at it is short: “Je moet beginnen met kijken, niet met studeren.” Start by looking, not by studying.

A shipowner’s collection

Rutten made his money as an entrepreneur in shipping and oil trading and collected prints for decades on personal taste. Before the museum existed, parts of the collection travelled: in 2006 they were shown at the Charlier Museum in Brussels, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul and at the Haugar art museum in Tønsberg, Norway. Loans, donations and the habits of established museums proved difficult, and he decided to open a house of his own, partly because engravings so often spend their lives in drawers, out of public view.

He chose Antwerp for its printing history, the city of Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus, whose workshop survives as the Museum Plantin-Moretus and its sixteenth-century presses. In 2017 he also reminded an interviewer that this was the city where “a wonderful event” had taken place in 1521. Albrecht Dürer was in Antwerp that year, and the museum later gave him a show of his own, Dürer in Antwerp, built on prints from the Royal Library of Belgium, which ran until 31 March 2025.

The money is private by principle. Rutten has called the idea of applying for government grants “flauw”, feeble, and set himself a target instead: 25,000 visitors a year, enough to cover running costs within five years of opening. The pandemic pushed that back. “Het staat niet op mijn voorhoofd getatoeëerd,” he said in 2021, “maar ik hoop nog altijd op 25.000 mensen per jaar.” It is not tattooed on his forehead, but he still hopes for it.

The name and the building

The building is called De Rede, after the roadstead, the stretch of river where ships lie at anchor. It went up in 2000 to a design by Antwerps Architecten Atelier, on the site of the office of an inland shipping company that worked the Rhine, and the museum occupies its lower floors under a block of flats. The extra letter in the museum’s name is deliberate: Reede is the spelling of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Antwerp’s engravers were at their peak. Next door, Het Redershuis, the headquarters of the Royal Belgian Shipping Association, holds a museum devoted to Eugeen Van Mieghem, the painter of the port, who also hangs in Rutten’s collection. A short walk north along the quay stands the MAS, the city’s museum on the river.

Three rooms, three masters

The core of the collection is three men: Francisco Goya, Félicien Rops and Edvard Munch, about 150 works between them in 2021. Each has a room of his own upstairs. Goya is there with his great series, Los Caprichos, Los Desastres de la Guerra, Los Disparates and La Tauromaquia. Rops is represented by, among much else, three different prints of Pornokratès. The Munch holding stood at 41 works in 2024, six of them added in 2023; The Low Countries magazine calls it the largest public Munch collection outside Norway.

The rooms were built without partitions, so that the three stay in conversation, and that is the best decision in the building. Goya and Rops looked outwards at society and its hypocrisies; Munch looked inwards. Seen in one sweep, the Spanish court painter and the Belgian provocateur make the Norwegian look less like a lone genius and more like the next step in a long argument about what a print can say.

Around them the collection runs to more than 300 works by artists from seven countries: Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, and about fifteen Belgians, among them Rik Wouters, James Ensor, Henri Evenepoel, Hugo Claus and Fred Bervoets. At the opening Rutten set aside duplicate prints that visitors could hold, to learn how paper, watermarks and ink behave. The museum provides magnifying glasses, which in a room of aquatints is less a gimmick than a necessity.

The shows

Temporary exhibitions, usually three a year, change the picture. In early 2020 the museum showed the German Expressionists of Die Brücke: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein. On 22 April 2021, the anniversary of her death in 1945, it opened a Kollwitz exhibition in a new wing, with 47 works lent by the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne and four of its own, under a line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that she often used: Saatfrüchte sollen nicht vermahlen werden, seed corn must not be ground. Paula Rego followed that summer with Power Games, including her series on abortion, which played a part in Portugal’s own debate.

In 2022 the museum turned five and Fred Bervoets turned 80, and so did Rutten. The Antwerp painter got an overview of his career, and he chose and rehung some of the works himself. “We hebben 33 werken van Goya opgeofferd en 15 werken van Munch geëvacueerd om plaats te maken,” Rutten said. Thirty-three Goyas sacrificed and fifteen Munchs evacuated, to make room.

For Europalia España, the festival that brings a guest country’s culture to Belgium, the museum then went the other way. Timeless Mastery, which ran until June 2026, hung almost 200 aquatints by Goya from the four great series and doubled the number of his drawings on display, with QR codes beside the frames for anyone who wants more than the magnifying glass gives. Museum De Reede’s own website lists the exhibition currently on the quay and its opening days.

In 2022 Rutten took 33 Goyas down to make room for Bervoets. For Europalia the museum put almost 200 up.