Works by renowned local artists include some fine pre-Raphaelite-style canvases by Isidore Opsomer (1878–1967), notably the 1900 painting of Jesus hanging out in Lier. Upstairs the museum's focus is on writer Felix Timmermans (1886–1947), whose 1916 novel Pallieter recast Lier folk as life-loving bohemians: they’d previously been dismissively nicknamed schapekoppen (sheep-heads) for their short-sighted medieval decision that the town should host a sheep market rather than Flanders’ first great university.
