Other Dutch painters--for we are speaking of the men, not of their
pictures--like Heemskerk, owed their choice of a profession to
accident. Everdingen, of the first order of landscape-painters, owed
his choice to a tempest which wrecked his ship on the shore of Norway,
where he remained, was inspired by the grand natural scenery and
created an original style of landscape art. Cornelisz Vroom also owed
his fortune to a shipwreck: he was on his way to Spain with some
religious pictures; when the vessel was wrecked near the coast of
Portugal, the poor artist saved himself with others on an uninhabited
island, where they remained two days without food. They considered
themselves as good as lost, when they were unexpectedly relieved by
some monks from a monastery on the coast, whither the sea had borne
the hulk of the vessel with the pictures, which were unharmed. These
the monks considered admirable. Thus was Cornelisz sheltered,
welcomed, and stimulated to paint, and the profound emotions
occasioned by the wreck gave his genius such a new and powerful
impulse that he became a real artist. Another, Hans Fredeman, the
famous trick painter who painted some columns on the frame of a
drawing-room door so cleverly that Charles V. turned round to look as
soon as he had entered, and thought that the walls had suddenly closed
behind him by enchantment,--this Hans Fredeman, who painted palisades
that made people turn back, doors which people attempted to open, owed
his fortune to a book on architecture by Vitruvius which he obtained
by chance from a carpenter.
There is a good little picture by Steen which represents a doctor
pretending to operate on a man who imagines himself to be sick: an old
woman is holding a basin, the invalid is shrieking desperately, and a
few curious neighbors, convulsed with laughter, look on from a window.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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