Jacobus van Looy was born on 12 September 1855 in Haarlem, the son of a carpenter, who lost his job when his eyesight began to fail. His mother passed away when he was five years old and when his father died soon afterwards, the young Jacobus ended up in the local orphanage. He trained to become a house painter, but was able to follow drawing classes from 1877 at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 1884, Van Looy received the Prix de Rome, which allowed him to travel. The following two years he spent traveling through Italy, Spain and Morocco. Until 1892 he lived in Amsterdam, when he married Titia van Gelder and moved to Soest. In 1901, they spent a year travelling through Spain and Morocco. Van Looy moved back to Haarlem in 1913, the year the orphanage where he grew up was vacated and became the current location of the Frans Hals Museum.

Van Looy was a successful author and editor of the prestigious De Nieuwe Gids. After he received a critical review of his art, he focused on his writing and just painted for personal pleasure. His wife’s well-to-do family supported the couple and acquired some of the most important works. The majority of his collection remained in the family, while his Haarlem home on the corner of the Haarlemmerhout Park was converted to a museum in his name after his death in 1930. It closed in 1976 and the collection was transferred to the Frans Hals Museum. The Teylers Museum in Haarlem holds Van Looy’s early drawings from his travels.

The sitter in the present pastel is Hein de Ruijer, Van Looy’s loyal gardener in Soest, near Utrecht, where he and Titia resided between 1894 and 1907. In the countryside surrounding their villa Zomerzorg, the meadows and hayfields were an important source of inspiration for many of Van Looy’s most celebrated paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Teylers Museum. Similar sized oil paintings–a sketch on panel and a close-up on canvas–as well as a sketch on cream-colored paper of Hein de Ruijer are in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. Both oils and works on paper are preparatory studies for a much larger painting, Hein de Ruijer: in the garden in autumn.