Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)

"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is a 21-line poem written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood. It was first published under the title "Palais des beaux arts" (Palace of Fine Arts) in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann. It next appeared in the collected volume of verse Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), which was followed four months later by the English edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).

The museum, however named, is famous for its collection of Early Netherlandish paintings. When Auden visited the museum he would have seen a number of the paintings of the "Old Masters" referred to in the second line of the poem, including the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which at the time was still regarded as an original by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem describes, through the use of Breugel's paintings, humankind's indifference to the suffering of others.

The poem's changing titles come from the names used by the museum in Brussels containing the painting. When Auden first published it in 1929 this was "Palais des beaux arts" ("Palace of Fine Arts"), still used as the name of the imposing 19th century museum building. But the museum rebranded itself after World War II as (in French) Musée des Beaux Arts, and Auden's various publishers switched to this name as the title of the poem. Auden's poem begins: "About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters...". Possibly taking a hint from Auden, by the 2020s it had been renamed again to the Oldmasters Museum, officially expressed in the Belgian bilingual style as Musée Oldmasters Museum. The appropriation and reshaping of the English term Old Masters (oude meester in Dutch, vieux maître in French) was thought to work well in a Belgian context, and the museum's collection is rich in the Netherlandish paintings from before 1800 for which the term was coined.