Castle of Rubens

Zemst, Belgium, Belgium

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The Castle of Rubens (Het Steen, also called Kasteel van Elewijt or Rubenskasteel) is a historic Renaissance‑style chateau in the village of Elewijt, part of the municipality of Zemst in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, best known as the country estate where the great Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked from 1635 until his death in 1640.

The site originally grew from an 11th‑century wooden motte‑and‑bailey tower on an artificial hill, which was replaced around 1300 by a stone fortress; after centuries of wars and religious unrest it became a more peaceful residence, and in 1635 Rubens bought the dilapidated castle for 93,000 Carolus florins, rebuilt it into a Flemish Renaissance‑style mansion with a drawbridge, moat, park, gardens, meadows, ponds and trees, and lived there with his second wife Hélène Fourment and their family.

The castle appears in several of Rubens’s celebrated landscape paintings, including “The Rainbow Landscape,” “A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning” and “Tournament in Front of Steen Castle,” and through Hélène’s second marriage the property passed to the Bergeyck de Broeckhoven family, while over the centuries it served at times as a noble residence, a state prison and a private estate, remaining in private hands until 2019 when it was acquired by the Flemish government (Tourism Flanders) with the aim of opening it to the public.