Jan Kooi (c. 1840 – after 1884) was a Dutch KNIL (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army) military officer from Ghana.

He is best known today for his portrait painted by Johan Conrad Leich in 1882 when Kooi was back in the Netherlands.

He is proudly wearing his four Dutch service medals, the most prominent being the leftmost one, Knight of the Fourth Class of the Military Order of William, which he received in 1878 for his service in the Second Aceh Expedition, part of the Aceh War.

[1] Kooi's colleagues were also portrayed by other Dutch painters at the time, most notably Kees Pop (again, probably a Dutch name given him by the Elmina recruiters): Both portraits show the military honors of the Expedition Cross and the Aceh Medal, and they featured in the 2008 exhibition in the Amsterdam Nieuwe Kerk called "Black is beautiful, Rubens tot Dumas".

The exhibition sparked a national conversation about the Aceh expedition survivors, and the journalist Griselda Molemans later wrote books, made documentaries, and founded a society to gather all the claims by survivors of the KNIL against the Dutch state.