Roger and Josette Vanthournout were a Belgian couple whose shared passion for art shaped more than sixty years of collecting. Roger, trained in design and decoration and later the founder of a successful furniture manufacturing business, approached art with an architectural eye; Josette, a painter with a refined sense of colour and composition, brought an artist’s sensitivity to every acquisition.

Together, they embodied Belgium’s long-standing tradition of looking outward – a spirit rooted in the country’s history as a cultural and commercial crossroads. In the tradition of Belgian collectors who looked beyond their borders, they embraced diverse artistic currents, with an outward-looking spirit which recalls the prominence of Flanders in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the region stood alongside Venice, Genoa and Amsterdam as a major hub of European trade with the East. That same entrepreneurial openness animated the Vanthournouts’ own journey.

From the mid-1950s onwards, they travelled widely, engaging directly with artists, dealers and galleries, and embracing diverse artistic currents with a quietly confident eye. Their taste evolved continually: early interests in Chinese ceramics and Flemish Expressionism gave way to Surrealism, Minimalism, and leading strands of Post-War European and American art, and their home in Flanders became a carefully choreographed environment where sculpture played a central role, surrounded by paintings, works on paper and photography selected for the dialogues they created.