The city museum of Aalst occupies a beautiful former hospice known as ’t Gasthuis.
The mediaeval building has been sensitively restored with whitewashed walls, tiled floors and a walled herb garden. It feels like a calm, contemplative place.
A quiet room in the Aalst municipal museum is dedicated to the relatively unknown 20th-century Aalst painter Valerius De Saedeleer. The walls are lined with subtle, mystical paintings of the Flemish landscape that could almost have been done by Bruegel.
De Saedeleer was one of several Belgian artists who fled to England during the First World War. He ended up staying in a house in Wales where he continued to paint landscapes.
A statue of the artist stand in the square outside the Aalst museum.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
