P.F.C. (PYKE) KOCH 1901 Beek (The Netherlands) - 1991 Wassenaar (The Netherlands) Portrait of Hans Philips

Pieter Frans Christiaan Koch was born on 15 July 1901 in Beek, Gelderland, the only son of the village physician. At grammar school in Nijmegen, he acquired the nickname Pyke, which he kept as his given name for the rest of his life. He began reading law at Utrecht in 1920, but in the summer of 1927, shortly before his final examinations, he abandoned his studies to devote himself entirely to painting. Utrecht remained his home.

Koch cultivated the image of the complete autodidact, although he took technical advice from Erich Wichman and attended lectures on painting materials at the university's art-historical institute. His 1928 debut with Dolores' Breakfast and Woman with a Gramophone made a striking impression on the critics. His work is characterised by a combination of exacting, almost Old Masterly rendering of skin, fabric, and stone with a strongly formalised construction: frontal figures placed in a shallow, stage-like space, assembled from observed details rather than painted from life. Around 1930, he drew his subjects from the frayed edges of ordered society, painting slum streets, fairground scenes, and prostitutes to whom he gave the bearing of goddesses. The example of the Neue Sachlichkeit, of German cinema, and of the Freudian thinking he absorbed through his brother-in-law August Stärcke is evident throughout.

Bertha of Antwerp and The Shooting Gallery, both of 1931, established his reputation; the latter was bought by a group of Rotterdam citizens and presented to Museum Boijmans. With Willink, Hynckes, Ket, and Schuhmacher, Koch formed the core of Magic Realism, the dominant Dutch movement of the 1930s. He was the only one of them at ease with the label and supplied his own definition: magic realism employs images that are possible but not probable.

He married Jkvr. Heddy de Geer in 1934. Extended stays in Florence between 1937 and 1939 deepened his admiration for Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. His fascist sympathies during the 1930s and his brief NSB membership under the occupation led to a one-year exhibition ban imposed in 1950. His post-war work grew lighter and more colourful, culminating in Women in the Street (1962–1964) and Souvenir d'un songe (1966). With The Tightrope Walker (1982), he deliberately brought his oeuvre to a close.

His labour-intensive technique and unsparing self-criticism kept that oeuvre small: no more than some 120 paintings and 65 drawings over 55 years, alongside postage-stamp designs, theatre sets, and the street lanterns of central Utrecht. He was, nonetheless, for many years the most highly paid painter in the Netherlands. He died in Wassenaar on 27 October 1991. His work is held in every major Dutch museum collection.