The Royal Galleries of

Ostend Ostend ( nl, Oostende, ; french: link=no, Ostende ; german: link=no, Ostende ; vls, Ostende) is a coastal city and municipality, located in the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerk ...

( nl, Koninklijke Gaanderijen) are a seaside neoclassical

arcade Arcade most often refers to: * Arcade game, a coin-operated game machine ** Arcade cabinet, housing which holds an arcade game's hardware ** Arcade system board, a standardized printed circuit board * Amusement arcade, a place with arcade games * ...

on a dike on the beach of

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to ...

. They extend from the royal villa in the east to the

Hippodrome Wellington The Hippodrome Wellington (also ''Wellingtonrenbaan'') is a horse racing track in Ostend in the Flemish Region of Belgium built in 1883, renovated in 2011 and named after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. The facility hosts both harne ...

horse racing track in the west. The galleries are over long, with a large

pavilion In architecture, ''pavilion'' has several meanings: * It may be a subsidiary building that is either positioned separately or as an attachment to a main building. Often it is associated with pleasure. In palaces and traditional mansions of Asia ...

at each end. The luxury Thermae Palace Hotel sits atop the central section.

History

The Royal Galleries were constructed between 1902 and 1906 following the plans of architect

Charles Girault Charles-Louis Girault (27 December 1851 – 26 December 1932) was a French architect. Biography Born in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, he studied with Honoré Daumet at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He received the first Pr ...

on the orders of

King Leopold II of Belgium * german: link=no, Leopold Ludwig Philipp Maria Viktor , house = Saxe-Coburg and Gotha , father = Leopold I of Belgium , mother = Louise of Orléans , birth_date = , birth_place = Brussels, Belgium , death_date = ...

. They allowed the king and his guests to pass from the royal villa on the beach to the racetrack without being inconvenienced by rain or wind. The galleries show Leopold's attachment to Ostend, his favourite resort, and some charged him with neglecting

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

, the capital, in favour of Ostend. The king followed the construction closely, personally visiting on February 25, 1905. It was built with the allowance that the city of Ostend received in 1902 as compensation for the ban on gambling. There were originally

wrought iron Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.08%) in contrast to that of cast iron (2.1% to 4%). It is a semi-fused mass of iron with fibrous slag inclusions (up to 2% by weight), which give it a wood-like "grain" ...

grilles between the columns, though these were melted down in the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

. During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, the galleries were walled off along their entire length, making them a link in Hitler's

Atlantic Wall The Atlantic Wall (german: link=no, Atlantikwall) was an extensive system of coastal defences and fortifications built by Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1944 along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia as a defence against an anticip ...

. The paintings were a frequent subject of the works of the Ostend

symbolist Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...

painter

Léon Spilliaert Léon Spilliaert (also Leon Spilliaert; 28 July 1881 – 23 November 1946) was a Belgian symbolist painter and graphic artist. Biography Spilliaert was born in Ostend, the oldest of seven children of Léonard-Hubert Spilliaert, a perfu ...

. The Royal Galleries were listed as a protected monument on September 22, 1981.

Architecture

The galleries contain a great number of paired

Tuscan order The Tuscan order (Latin ''Ordo Tuscanicus'' or ''Ordo Tuscanus'', with the meaning of Etruscan order) is one of the two classical orders developed by the Romans, the other being the composite order. It is influenced by the Doric order, but with ...

columns, with each pair sharing a

bluestone Bluestone is a cultural or commercial name for a number of dimension or building stone varieties, including: * basalt in Victoria, Australia, and in New Zealand * dolerites in Tasmania, Australia; and in Britain (including Stonehenge) * felds ...

pedestal, and each column has a simple torus at its base. The columns support an

entablature An entablature (; nativization of Italian , from "in" and "table") is the superstructure of moldings and bands which lies horizontally above columns, resting on their capitals. Entablatures are major elements of classical architecture, and ...

composed of a bare

architrave In classical architecture, an architrave (; from it, architrave "chief beam", also called an epistyle; from Greek ἐπίστυλον ''epistylon'' "door frame") is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of columns. The term can a ...

, a

frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

adorned with

triglyph Triglyph is an architectural term for the vertically channeled tablets of the Doric frieze in classical architecture, so called because of the angular channels in them. The rectangular recessed spaces between the triglyphs on a Doric frieze are ...

s above each column, and a moulded

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

that projects strongly out of the wall supported by flat rectangular

corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in the wall, whereas a console is a piece applied to the s ...

History

Architecture

References

See also