Jacobus van Looy

Jac van Looy's best-known book, Jaapje, follows a boy growing up in the municipal orphanage of Haarlem. It came out in 1917, when the author was past sixty, and the boy was himself. His mother died when he was a small child, his father soon after, and the orphanage had him trained as a house painter while he took drawing lessons in the evenings.

A drawing teacher persuaded the orphanage governors to send him to the Rijksakademie, the national art academy in Amsterdam. There he met the painter Willem Witsen, and the two became central figures of the Tachtigers, the Movement of the Eighties, young writers and artists set on shaking up Dutch art and letters. Van Looy worked on both sides. He wrote for their magazine, De Nieuwe Gids, and in 1884 he won the Prix de Rome for painting, shared with Jan Dunselman because the jury could not choose between them. The prize paid for travels through Italy, Spain and Morocco in 1885 and 1886.

In 1894 he married Titia van Gelder and settled in the village of Soest, where he stayed until 1907. Back in Haarlem, he bought a house in 1913 beside the Haarlemmerhout, the city's old wooded park, and he died there in 1930. Since 1985 a prize in his name has gone to artists who both write and paint.