50.8462° N, 4.3558° E

BRUSSELS

Most Famous People Born in Brussels, Belgium

Notable people

3,534

Peak decade

1960s

Median birth year

1912

Most distinctive

Painter 4.3×

A small capital with an outsized share of painters and architects. Brussels's distinctive professions are painters and architects at more than three times the global rate, alongside sculptors, artists, composers, and a deep film bench — the legacy of the Académie Royale, the franco-belge comics tradition, and a postwar Belgian cinema that punched above its weight. The 19th century is unusually heavy here, when Brussels was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe and art nouveau was inventing itself in the streets around the Palais Royal.