3-011-963 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Grand Festival of the Municipality and Royal Academy of Antwerp: temporary restoration of the Old Bourse during the fair, 1864. 'The most important [of] all the ceremonies, shows, and entertainments...was a fair "in the fashion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", held amidst the ruins of the old Bourse of Antwerp, destroyed by fire a few years ago. The chief architectural features of that building have been restores, provisionally, by M. Looymans, so far as to reproduce the effect of its interior when occupied by the stalls of the tradesmen, with a crowd of purchasers or spectators on the floor...The annual Kermesse, or festival of the patron saint of the municipality, an occasion which is always celebrated with much pomp...was combined in this instance with the two-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Antwerp Royal Academy of Arts, and with the jubilee, or fiftieth yearly meeting, of the Royal Society of Harmony; besides which, an exhibition of the works of living artists was opened by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Art'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.