Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Van Huysum, Jacob
VAN HUYSUM, JACOB (JAMES), (1687?–1746), flower-painter, born at Amsterdam about 1687, was brother of the celebrated flower-painter, Jan Van Huysum, and son of Justus Van Huysum (1659–1716), a painter, of Amsterdam. He painted in the same manner and in as close an imitation of his brother's work as possible. Though he never attained the same excellence, his work, especially in England, has often been mistaken for his brother's. Van Huysum came to England about 1721, in which year he was living in the house of a patron, Mr. Lockyear of the South Sea House. Subsequently he was patronised by Sir Robert Walpole, who received him as an inmate of his house at Chelsea, and employed him to paint flower-pieces and copies from old masters for the decoration of the great house at Houghton in Norfolk. Through his drunken and dissolute habits he lost this and other patronage, and died in obscurity in 1746.
[Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting; Vertue's Diaries (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 23068); Descamps's Vies des Peintres Flamands, 1764, iv. 231; Bryan's Dict. of Painters and Engravers, ed. Graves and Armstrong.]