The Sikkens Prize was inaugurated in 1959 on the initiative of A.M. Mees, the then director of the Sikkens Paint Factory in Sassenheim. The prize was meant as an expression of appreciation for those artists, architects and designers who had created a work in which a synthesis of space and colour was achieved. Mees’s initiative stemmed on the one hand from his interest in art and on the other hand from his position in a firm in which colour was the leading factor in the manufacture of products. In the years that followed many Sikkens Prizes were awarded to architects, artists and organisations at home and abroad and the Sikkens Prize became a household word in the world of art and culture. In 1972 Akzo Nobel, of which Sikkens is a subsidiary, disengaged the Sikkens Prize from industrial patronage and placed it under an independent foundation, the Sikkens Prize Foundation, later Sikkens Foundation. The formula in force until then was enlarged and the attention of Sikkens Foundation’s board focussed more on colour as a universal phenomenon. During the last decades Sikkens Foundation has grown into a prominent representative of private cultural sponsoring in the Netherlands.