Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom

Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom nearly did not become a painter at all, because he nearly drowned first. Travelling as a young man, he was shipwrecked on the coast of Portugal and taken for an English pirate, threatened with execution, and saved only when his rescued belongings turned out to include devotional pictures that marked him as a fellow Catholic. Another time, seized by a bad feeling, he stepped off a ship at the last moment and watched it go down in the sound off Denmark.

He came from Haarlem, where he started out painting decoration onto pottery, his family's trade. In Rome the landscape painter Paulus Bril gave him lessons and pushed him toward pictures. Once home, Vroom did something new. He made the sea itself the subject, the ships and storms and light on water, and is remembered as the founder of Dutch marine painting, a kind of picture the seafaring young republic was hungry for.

His most famous commission left Holland entirely. He designed a set of ten tapestries showing the defeat of the Spanish Armada, woven for the English Lord Admiral and later hung in the House of Lords in London. They burned in the fire that destroyed the old Palace of Westminster in 1834, and are known now only from engravings.