A Life Shaped by the Campine Jakob Smits began his life as the son of a decorator in Rotterdam, a beginning that likely instilled in him a fundamental respect for the craft of surface and ornament. His education was a wandering one, moving through the academies of Brussels, Munich, Vienna, and Rome. These early years were spent absorbing the formal rigors of European training before he eventually found his true footing. In 1882, he married his cousin Antje Doetje Kramer, and the couple settled in Amsterdam, where Smits undertook various painting tasks, including work for the museum Boijmans-…