Jakob Smits

Jakob Smits or Jacob Smits (Rotterdam, 9 July 1855 – Achterbos (Mol), 15 February 1928) was a Dutch-Flemish painter.

He was born a son of a decorator. Jakob studied in Rotterdam at the academy and helped his father in the decoration business. From 1873 to 1876 he studied at the Academy in Brussels, and after in Munich (1878-1880), Vienna (1880) and Rome (1880). In 1882 Jakob married his cousin Antje Doetje Kramer. They settled in Amsterdam where Smits worked as a painter. He carried out, among other things, tasks for the museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Out of the marriage of Jakob and Antje were produced two children, Theodora and Annie. In 1884, the couple divorced.

Jakob Smits moved to Blaricum and in Haarlem becomes director of the Nijverheids- en Decoratieschool (E: Industry and Decoration school). He gets to know Albert Neuhuys, a painter of the The Hague School, and together they make excursions to Drenthe and the Campine in Belgium. Jakob Smits becomes impressed by the Campine landscape and he establishes himself in 1888, definitively in Achterbos (Mol). He pays 2,000 Belgian francs for a small farm which he develops to his Malvinahof. In the same year he marries Malvina Dedeyn, the daughter of a Brussels lawyer, who is disinherited because of this marriage. Smits lives in poverty while he works tirelessly for what he will call my simple work, symbolic, poetic and real. In 1897, he received a gold medal for his exhibitions of large water-colour paintings on a gold background in Munich and Dresden. He also paints a lot of portraits, especially of Malvina and of their children Boby, Marguerite and Kobe. In 1899 destiny strikes: in a few days time he loses his daughter Alice and his wife. In 1901, Smits marries with Josine Van Cauteren. In the same year he holds his first individual exposition in Antwerp. There he obtains much praise of colleagues and critics but finds no buyer for his work. The exhibited work De vader van de veroordeelde (E: the father of the convict) was acquired later that year by the Museum of Brussels.

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