As well as being the capital city of Belgium, and the de facto capital of the European Union, Brussels has long been a hub of the visual arts, too. It boasts one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious art fairs, BRAFA, which launched in 1956 and returns at the end of January for its 69th edition, as well as Art Brussels, now in its 40th year. Also worthy of note is the city’s vibrant gallery scene and, among various other attractions, WIELS, a five-storey centre for contemporary art that opened in a former brewery near Brussels Midi/Zuid train station in 2007; and the Magritte Museum, founded in 2009, which houses the world’s largest assemblage of works by the great Surrealist, including many on loan from private collections.

At the end of next year, the KANAL-Centre Pompidou — a branch of the Pompidou in Paris — will open its doors in the city. Dedicated to modern and contemporary art, it is set to be the largest cultural institution in Brussels.

‘Belgium is also well known for its collectors,’ says Astrid Centner, director of Christie’s Belgium. ‘Acquiring art is in the national DNA. We’re renowned for having the highest number of art collectors, per capita, anywhere in the world — and their interest stretches across periods from Old Masters to contemporary art.’ Not to mention other areas of Christie’s expertise, including luxury goods, design and rare books.

One reason for this propensity is Belgium’s relative youth as a nation (it came into being in 1830) and the fact that it is a federal state split into three very distinct regions: Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north; mainly French-speaking Wallonia in the south (also home to a small German-speaking community to the east); and multilingual Brussels roughly in the middle. ‘There isn’t really a tradition of state-owned art in Belgium,’ says Centner, ‘and as a result, a culture grew of private individuals making purchases.’

In recent years, some Belgian collectors have chosen to open spaces in which to put their collections on public view. These include Walter Vanhaerents and his children with the Vanhaerents Art Collection in Brussels; Anton and Annick Herbert with the Herbert Foundation in Ghent; and Fernand Huts with the Phoebus Foundation, which will get a home in Antwerp later this decade.

‘When you’re talking about the success of the art scene in Belgium — and Brussels in particular — you have to consider location, too,’ says Peter van der Graaf, senior specialist in Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s. ‘Geographically, it lies between Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Basel… all these great cultural cities, and Brussels is right in the middle of them. There’s no doubt that this brings to the place a certain energy and dynamism.’

Christie’s has had a presence in Brussels since 1976. It opened its first representative office here a decade later, on Boulevard de Waterloo in the city centre. The company recently moved into a new office: a larger space on elegant Avenue Louise, one of the country’s most famous streets. Named after a Belgian princess of the late 19th and early 20th century, and sometimes referred to as ‘the Brussels Champs-Elysées’, the avenue is dotted with international embassies and runs for roughly two miles south-east of the city centre.

‘The new office is in a quieter, more accessible area than before,’ says Centner. ‘It’s very close to important galleries [in the Ixelles neighbourhood] such as Xavier Hufkens and Almine Rech, and — crucially — nearer to many of our clients’ homes.’

The building itself is an hôtel particulier, an old townhouse, in which Christie’s occupies two floors. Centner says that she and her team ‘have tried to make the interior welcoming and modern, with designer furniture and a spacious feel. We want clients to feel welcome in a warm atmosphere when they come here, so they can be entirely relaxed as they read our catalogues or ask us questions.’