nd flourished at the period of
Italian imitation. He was the son of a peasant, and, although he had
an inclination toward art, he was intended for a peasant. He became a
painter by chance, like many other Dutch artists. His father had a
furious temper, and the son was very much afraid of him. One day poor
Van Veen dropped the milk-jug; his father flew at him, but he ran out
of the house and spent the night somewhere else. The next morning his
mother found him, and, thinking it would be unsafe for him to face the
paternal anger, she gave him a small quantity of linen, a little
money, and commended him to the care of God. The lad went to Haarlem,
and, obtaining an entrance to the studio of a famous artist, he
studied, succeeded, and then went to Rome to perfect himself. He did
not become a great artist, for the imitation of the Italian school
spoiled him: his treatment of the nude was stiff and his style full of
mannerisms, but he painted a great deal and was well paid, and did not
regret his early life. But herein consisted his peculiarity: he was,
as his biographers assert, a man incredibly, morbidly and ridiculously
timid. When he knew that the arquebusiers were to pass he climbed the
roofs and steeples, and trembled with fear when he saw their arms in
the street. If any one thinks this an idle story, there is a fact
which serves to prove it true: he was in the town of Haarlem when the
Spaniards besieged it, and the magistrates, who knew his weakness,
permitted him to flee from the city before they began to fight,
doubtless foreseeing that otherwise he would have died of fright. He
took advantage of the permission and fled to Amsterdam, leaving his
fellow-citizens in the lurch.

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 f