Professor Jacques Caspar Henricus Van der Meulen was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who was head of the academic department of plastic surgery in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. When he was awarded the honorary fellowship of the college in 1993 it was noted that he was one of the foremost academic plastic and reconstructive surgeons on the continent. When he embarked on a career in plastic surgery he was inspired by the work of a fellow Dutchman, Johannes (Jan) Fredericus Samuel Esser (1877-1946). Esser pioneered reconstructive plastic surgery on soldiers who had been disfigured in the first world war and, among other intriguing methods of reconstruction, he described the axial or arterial pattern flap. Van der Meulen took his innovative research further, particularly in the fields of craniofacial surgery, facial clefts and clefts of the lip and palate and also in hand surgery and hypospadias repair. He published widely and was associate or corresponding editor of six specialist journals worldwide. Co-author of an important work on craniofacial malformations, he also wrote a monograph on hypospadias. He was president of the College of Surgeons of the Netherlands, president of the European Association of Plastic Surgeons and president of the European Court for Plastic Surgery. An annual event was the reconstructive course he ran every year for fellow European surgeons, appropriately called the Esser course. Keen to encourage his trainees, he was known as a wise and convivial colleague. He died on 15 April 2017 aged 87.