Jacob van Huysum

Jacob van Huysum (1688 – 1740) was an 18th-century botanical painter from the Dutch Republic who moved to the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1721.

One source says that “his chief merit was in copying so well his brother Jan’s pictures, that his copies have been mistaken for original works by Jan.”[2] Another art historian states that while his work is less finished and less delicately colored than Jan’s, his paintings still have “great merit” in their own right.

This contrasts with the meticulously exact mode of Georg Dionysius Ehret, his contemporary colleague.

Later he enjoyed the patronage of Sir Robert Walpole, who befriended him, and commissioned him to paint decorative works for his house at Houghton in Norfolk.

These plants had come from the Cape of Good Hope, North America, the West Indies, and Mexico.