The house where Peter Paul Rubens lived, worked and died has been closed since 9 January 2023, and it will not reopen before 2030. That is the first thing to know before you go to the Rubens House on the Wapper. The second is that you should go anyway, because since 30 August 2024 the visit starts somewhere else: in a new building at Hopland 13, round the corner, which leads into a replanted garden, a library of 100,000 publications and a show about the painter, and shows you the house from the garden.

An Italian palace on the Vaartstraat

Rubens married Isabella Brant in 1609 and bought a Flemish townhouse on what was then the Vaartstraat, now the Wapper, in 1610. He had it rebuilt and extended to his own designs as an Italian-style villa, with a monumental portico, an inner courtyard and a Baroque garden he also planned. He painted in a large studio next door with his students and assistants, and kept a smaller private studio for drawings, portraits and small panels. He died there in 1640.

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The house had famous tenants. Rubens’s widow, Helena Fourment, let it to William Cavendish and his wife Margaret, and it was sold after they left in 1660. Two and a half centuries later the architect Henri Blomme built a full-size replica of it for the 1910 World’s Fair in Brussels, and when he died in 1921 he left money to buy the original. The city of Antwerp bought it in 1937 and, after a long restoration, opened it as a museum in 1946. It celebrated 75 years as a museum in 2021.

One correction for readers of an earlier version of this guide: The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross do not hang here. Rubens painted the first in 1610 and 1611 for the high altar of St Walburga’s church; both now hang in the Cathedral of Our Lady. The Descent went to Paris in 1794 and to Berlin in 1914 before coming home after the armistice of 1918. In January 1886 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from Antwerp: “last Sunday I saw Rubens’ two large paintings for the first time.”

Why it closed

The museum’s problem was success. “There are many more visitors, and they put heavy pressure on the site,” Bert Watteeuw, its director at the time, told VRT in January 2022, when the closure was announced. The plan was practical: “First of all, we are improving the climate system in the museum,” he said, so that the paintings can be kept and shown in better conditions, and “we are building a lift so that visitors who are less steady on their feet can also see our collection.” The restoration also opens 50 per cent more of the house to the public. All of it happens inside the existing walls.

The first target was 28 June 2027, Rubens’s 450th birthday. The museum now says the residence will reopen in 2030 at the earliest. The second phase, the house itself, is estimated at €32.5m. The first phase, the new entrance and the garden, cost €18.73m, of which the city paid €14.58m, Toerisme Vlaanderen €4m and Flanders’ heritage agency €150,000. The Kolveniershof behind the house is being restored on the same timetable, for workshops, lectures and events.

The new door on Hopland

The reception building is by Robbrecht en Daem architecten, who were given the brief after the city asked the Flemish Government Architect in 2016 to make the site more accessible. It has 2,600 square metres on eight floors, six of them above ground, and its two façades are made of more than 500 slim columns, designed to read as two full-height bookcases in a nod to Rubens’s own library, which held more than 500 titles. Three diagonal spiral staircases echo the movement in his compositions, and the building stands to one side so that it does not block the view of the portico from the garden.

Putting the entrance, the ticket desk and the crowds in a new building rather than in Rubens’s rooms was the right decision, because by the director’s own account the house was suffering from too many people in too little space.

Inside, the Rubens Experience presents him as polymath, artist, husband and father, following him from Antwerp to Rome, London, Paris and Madrid with an audiovisual show, life-size details of his work and a few real objects, including his self-portrait. It runs at fixed start times, so arrive 15 minutes early. The library holds the Rubenianum collection, 2,000 metres of books, prints and archives, and is free to use without an appointment.

The garden

Rubens’s own garden plan has not survived, so the landscape firm Ars Horti rebuilt it from his 1630 painting The Walk in the Garden, hundreds of archive documents, flower still lifes, gardening handbooks and his letters. The Antwerp fashion designer Dries Van Noten advised on the colours, which change with the seasons, from bronze and yellow in summer to red in autumn. It opened with 17,500 plants, among them aquilegia, marigolds, peonies, citrus, figs, medlars and a yew planted almost 300 years ago; the museum now counts more than 22,000. Rainwater for them comes from six underground tanks. From the garden you can walk through to the courtyard and the loggia of the house you cannot enter. A combined ticket with the Museum Mayer van den Bergh costs €14 and is valid for two days.

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For now, then, the Rubens House is a garden, a library and a very good façade. The museum’s own visitor page lists the residence as temporarily closed. Rubens, who planned the garden as well as the house, would at least recognise the view.