Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom

Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (c.1562 – February 4, 1640 (buried)) was a Dutch Golden Age painter credited with being the founder of Dutch marine art or seascape painting. Beginning with the "birds-eye" viewpoint of earlier Netherlandish marine art, his later works show a view from lower down, and more realistic depiction of the seas themselves. He is not to be confused with his son and pupil Cornelis Vroom.

Vroom was born in Haarlem. Much of what is known of his life comes from his biography by Karel van Mander, who devoted four pages to him in his "Schilder-boeck", which reads as an adventure story, complete with freezing his pants to a mountain top and nearly starving to death on a rock with a group that discussed cannibalism as a possible survival strategy.

Though it is unknown at what age he started on his travels, Vroom was born into a family of artists and began his career as a pottery (faience) painter and when his mother remarried, was no older than 19 when he rebelled against his stepfather who insisted he stick to pottery painting, by boarding a ship for Spain (Sevilla) and from thence via Livorno and Florence to Rome.

In Florence he was patronized around 1585–87 by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, later Grand Duke of Tuscany. While there he became a pupil of Paulus Bril. He went back and forth to Venice, where he earned money as a majolica painter.

When he returned north, he travelled via Milan, Genoa, Albisola (a ceramics center where he again earned money painting ceramics), Turin (where he met the Haarlem painter Jan Kraeck), and Lyon (via a mountain pass where his pants froze to the summit rock). From there he travelled to Paris, where he met a painter from Leiden, and from there he went to Rouen, where he became mortally ill but was saved by a woman who bandaged his head.

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