[1] 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.

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.

[2] There he boarded a ship homewards and was back in Haarlem in 1590, the year he married, before travelling to Danzig (now Gdańsk) to visit his uncle, Frederick Henricksz, who was city architect there, and where he painted an altarpiece.

[2] During his next journey, this time to Portugal, he survived shipwreck, but was threatened with execution as "an English pirate" - from which he was saved by being recognized as a Catholic from his salvaged devotional paintings, which convinced the monks on the beach that he and his companions were not "heathen Protestants" (Vroom, having been to Italy, had coached his fellow survivors in the catechism).

Vroom's large and decorative battles, ceremonial scenes and beach views introduced novel compositional devices to be taken up by younger Dutch marinists.