Please note! Our art collection is currently closed, but in 2026 you will again be able to admire a selection of artwork.

Permanent collection

The collection of Museum Dr. Guislain consists of two sub-collections: the history of psychiatry and the art collection, a selection of which is on permanent display at the museum. The medical collection is the result of a small ‘core collection’ of old objects that were kept within the walls of the Guislain Hospital. Most of the collection was acquired by the museum itself, with items either purchased, donated or bequeathed. The medical collection is particularly heterogenous and made up of objects that belong to the pre-psychiatric period, the pre-Freudian humanities period and the period of biologically-oriented psychiatry. The museum also owns a large collection of photographs, capitalizing on 19th-century psychiatry's interest in this new medium. In 1850, for example, the Scottish ‘psychiatrist’ Dr. Diamond decided to stop illustrating his textbooks with engravings and instead use photographs. Photographs made it possible to adopt a ‘more objective approach’ when dealing with mentally ill people and help nascent science determine actual ‘types’ in psychiatric syndromes. In addition to a historical collection, the museum also regularly purchases work by contemporary photographers.

The second section in the Museum Dr. Guislain’s collection is based on outsider art. This term refers to the spontaneous and unconventional work of artists operating outside the professional art circuit or on the margins of society. They could be psychiatric patients, people with intellectual impairments, people living in isolation and struggling to find their place in society, as well as playful creative souls who irrepressibly go their own way in their work. The collection includes works by Gerard van Lankveld, Tim Brown, Sylvain Cosijns, Lucie Szaak, Willem van Genk, André Robillard, Irène Gérard, Paul Duhem, Alexis Lippstreu, Dirk Martens, Pascal Leyder, Jean Leclercq, Pascale Vincke, Herman Kamphuis, Marc Lamy, Shérazade Gharbi …

The Museum Dr. Guislain art collection not only includes outsider art, it also provides scope for art with a link to mental healthcare, such as work by Klaas Koopmans, Peter Granser, Gérard Alary, Jean Rustin, Koen Broucke, Ronny Delrue, Viviane Joakim, Stephan Vanfleteren, Mario De Brabandere, Sébastien Van Malleghem, Jan De Maesschalck and Marc Maet.