Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom

Hendrick (Cornelisz.) Vroom (* around 1563 in Haarlem ; † 1640 ibid) was a Dutch painter and draftsman and is considered the founder of European marine painting .

The arrival of Frederick V of the Palatinate in Vlissingen

family

Hendrick Vroom was the son of Cornelis Hendricksz. Vroom the Elder was born into a family of artists. His father was a sculptor and faience painter and his uncle Frederick Hendricksz. Vroom I. City architect in Gdansk . Hendrick Vroom's three sons and one of his grandsons later also worked as painters, with his son Cornelis Vroom having notable success in this regard.

Life

Hendrick Vroom first began training as a faience painter with his mother's relatives in Delft . Vroom's contemporary Karel van Mander reports of falling out with the family that prompted the young artist to leave the house. He traveled via Spain to Italy, where he stayed in Rome and Florence and worked as a faience painter for church dignitaries. From 1585 to 1587, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici , who later became the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was one of his supporters. This client, who was interested in seafaring, probably suggested Vroom's turn to marine painting. The earliest seascapes ascribed to Hendrick Vroom are now in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome. His friendship with the landscape painter Paul Bril had no artistic influence on Vroom, although he made some landscape drawings of the Rhone Valley in France on his return trip to Haarlem in 1590 . In the same year Vroom married and visited his uncle in Gdansk. He survived the following sea voyage to Portugal as a shipwrecked man and made a series of pictures of this experience, which he sold on site. On his final return to Haarlem, Vroom was already an internationally respected artist. His students include Simon de Vlieger , Jan Porcellis and Hans Goderis .

plant

Hendrick Vroom is considered the founder of European marine painting, although artists before him had painted seascapes. However, he was the first painter who devoted himself entirely to this subject and established it as an independent genre. His most important works include the drafts of ten tapestries that Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham commissioned. As Lord Admiral, he was Commander-in-Chief of the English fleet, and the cycle of images was intended to depict the victory of the English fleet over the Spanish Armada in 1588. The tapestries were made in Brussels between 1592 and 1595 and later hung in the British Parliament until they were destroyed in the building's fire in 1854. However, there are engravings from the 18th century based on the original. Further orders for decorative battle pictures by the Dutch and English fleets followed, with detailed images of the ships in the foreground. His often large-format paintings often show historical events, such as the arrival of Frederick V of the Palatinate in Vlissingen. The detailed representation of the ships contrasts with the imaginative representation of the events. In addition to individual portraits of ships, his works include views of entire fleets and wealthy ports. At a time when the Netherlands and England were emerging as leading seafaring nations, his naval pictures served the patriotic self-portrayal of the client.

gallery

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  Arrival of a Dutch three-master in front of Kronborg Castle

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  Departure of the East India sailors

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  The port of Amsterdam

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  The battle in the Haarlem Sea

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  Dutch ship rams Spanish galley off the Flemish coast in October 1602

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  Dutch ship and fishing boat in a fresh breeze

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  Merchant ships sail east

literature

• Laurens Johannes Bol: The Dutch marine painting of the 17th century Klinkhardt & Biermann 1973 ISBN 3-7814-0162-6
• Rupert Preston: The Seventeenth Century Marine Painters of the Netherlands F. Lewis 1974 ISBN 0-85317-025-8
• Margarita Russell: Visions of the Sea: Hendrick C. Vroom and the Origins of Dutch Marine Painting Brill 1983 ISBN 90-04-06938-0
• Jeroen Giltaij, Jan Kelch: Lords of the Seas, Masters of Art. The Dutch seascape in the 17th century . Berlin 1996, ISBN 90-6918-174-6
• Hermann Arthur Lier:  Vroom, Hendrik Cornelisz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 41, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, p. 774.

Web links

Commons : Hendrik Cornelisz. Vroom  - collection of images

• Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (English)
• Biography and works of the artist in the National Martime Museum, Greenwich ( Memento from December 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (English)