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The Limburg Museum in Venlo focuses on the culture and history of the province of Limburg. It was formed in 1993 from a merger between the Goltzius Museum and the Limburg Museum of Folklore. Its collection numbers some 80,000 objects and has three sections: archeology, cultural history, and moving images. The cultural history section contains a wealth of items of religious, art-historical, and/or material interest.
Examples from the art-historical collection include The Last Judgement by Hubert Goltzius, The Arrival of Louis XIV at the Siege of Maastricht by Adam Frans van der Meulen, Procession in Honor of St. Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and Winter Landscape with Skaters by Jan van Goyen. Other artists represented in the collection include Gerrit van Honthorst, David Teniers the Younger, Adriaen van de Venne, Pieter Wouwerman, Albert Cuyp, Josua de Grave, Jan de Beijer, Adriaen van Ostade, Philippe Coclers, David Vinckboons.
Dutch artists discovered Limburg in the nineteenth century and established several art circles in the surroundings of Mook (producing the “Peel landscapes”), in Meerssen, and in Maastricht (the Heuvelland and Meuse regions). As a result, artists from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries are well represented in the collection, examples including Hendrik Wiegersma and Willem van Konijnenburg. The rich collection of work produced by the twentieth-century Limburg School includes works by Joep Nicolas, Charles Eyck, Henri Jonas, Edmond Bellefroid, Harry Koolen, Hubert Levigne, Charles Vos, and Jean Adams.
Besides paintings, Limburg Museum also possesses a collection of sculptures dating from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Among the medieval highlights are statues by the Master van Elsloo, the contingency name (Notname) for a group of sculptors active around 1500, the Master of Koudewater, an anonymous sculptor from the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Master of Leende, Dries Holthuys, and Henrick van Holt. In addition, the museum has dozens of old wooden sculptures by unknown masters.