Jan Cunen Museum

The Jan Cunen Museum is the main cultural institution in Oss, housed in a stately brick building on Molenstraat in the town centre. The collection focuses on Dutch and Flemish art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a strong thread of regional Noord-Brabant work running through it.

Beyond the paintings, the museum has a permanent exhibition on the history of Oss itself: the rise and fall of the meatpacking industry, the Zwanenberg factory and its infamous canned meats, and the unlikely transformation of a processing town into one of the Netherlands' most important pharmaceutical centres. If you have any interest in Dutch industrial or social history, this section alone is worth the visit.

things to do museum
A story
The museum is named after Jan Cunen, a local politician who served as mayor of Oss for decades in the early twentieth century and amassed a personal art collection that became the seed of the museum's holdings. The building itself, a monumental 1930s construction, was designed to double as a cultural centre for a town that had grown rich on meat processing and pharmaceuticals.