On 30 September 1711, the magistrate of Brussels gave the guilds of painters, sculptors, and weavers permission to use a single room in the Town Hall on the Grand-Place to teach drawing. Sixteen days later, on 16 October, classes officially began. There was no building, no faculty, and not much of a curriculum - the school existed mainly to standardise the kind of figure drawing that workshop apprentices were already supposed to learn from their masters. The first rules were adopted in 1737. The school went through a difficult adolescence in the mid-eighteenth century, moving briefly to an inn called 't Gulden Hoofd and suspending classes for a stretch. In 1762, the Habsburg governor Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine put the school under his protection, mostly because he was interested in architectural education. In 1768 it was reorganised as the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, funded by public subscription, modelled on the French academies. The French Revolutionary troops who arrived in 1795 closed the school down.

The Academy reopened in stages after Napoleon, eventually moving in 1829 to the Granvelle Palace and then in 1832 to the basement of the Industrial Palace. In 1830 the painter Francois-Joseph Navez became director and began the slow work of turning a craft school into a serious art academy. Under his leadership the curriculum expanded, the standards rose, and in 1836 the school received the privilege of attaching "Royal" to its name. In 1876, the Academy moved into the buildings it still occupies today on the Rue du Midi - a converted former convent of the Bogards that had spent the intervening decades as an orphanage. The architect linked the existing structures together and redesigned the facade in the neoclassical style. The school has been there ever since. From 5 January 1889, women were allowed to participate in advanced classes - though it took most of the rest of the nineteenth century before that opening began to mean much in practice.

Rene Magritte arrived at the Academy in 1916 at the age of seventeen and stayed until 1918. He was, by most accounts, a mediocre student in a school still oriented toward conventional academic training. What the Academy gave him was less a technique than a Brussels - a circle of fellow artists, a relationship with the avant-garde forming around galleries and journals, the time and the framework to discover that what he wanted to do had not yet been invented. By the late 1920s he was painting bowler-hatted men, levitating apples, and a particular pipe captioned Ceci n'est pas une pipe. His exact contemporary at the Academy was Paul Delvaux, born 1897, who became the other major Belgian surrealist - sleepwalking women, classical temples, moonlit train stations frozen in dream logic. Two students sitting in the same drawing class in the late 1910s, each producing decades later the imagery that defined a national style. The Academy could not have predicted them. Schools rarely can.

In November 1880, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Brussels with no money and a determination to learn drawing. He was twenty-seven years old, recently fired from his job as a lay preacher in the Borinage coal-mining region, and convinced that art might be the next attempt at a life that had so far refused to settle into anything. He enrolled in the Academy. He studied anatomy and perspective. He copied figures from plaster casts in the cold studio rooms. He lasted only a few months before the institution and the young van Gogh agreed, mostly without words, that he was not going to thrive there. He returned to the Netherlands in April 1881. The mature van Gogh emerged from a different and slower kind of education - mostly self-taught, mostly elsewhere - but the Brussels Academy can claim the marginal honour of having tried. Half a century later, the cartoonist Pierre Culliford, who signed his work as Peyo, would also pass through these studios. In 1958 he created Les Schtroumpfs - the Smurfs - in the Belgian comics magazine Spirou.

Walking around Brussels, you can read the Academy's faculty list off the buildings. Joseph Poelaert, the architect of the Palace of Justice, studied here. Tilman-Francois Suys designed the original facade of the Royal Palace of Brussels and the dome of Saint-Jacques-sur-Coudenberg. Eugene Simonis sculpted the Godfrey of Bouillon equestrian statue at the Place Royale. Victor Horta - Art Nouveau's defining figure - taught at the Academy and reorganised its studio system in 1912. His own buildings (the Hotel Tassel, the Hotel Solvay, the Hotel van Eetvelde) helped make Brussels what one history book calls the uncrowned capital of Art Nouveau from 1889 onward. Charles van der Stappen, sculptor and director, raised the school's prestige further. The sculptor Jef Lambeaux passed through, as did the painters Jean-Francois Portaels, Louis Gallait, and the surrealists' teachers Constant Montald and Jean Delville. Generations of architects, painters, and sculptors built the city outside the studio with what they learned inside it. The Academy is still operating from the same converted convent on the Rue du Midi, still teaching, still arguing with itself about what kind of school it should be.