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.

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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.

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