Trained as a painter, he became an illustrator when his brother Pierre urged him to join the staff of the newspaper Gil Blas.

He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well established, did he exhibit oil-paintings.

[...] Jean Veber is the descendant in the direct line of the younger David Teniers, the Adriaen Brouwers, and the Hollen-Breughels.

From them he derives his full style of painting, his deep, rich colours, his great sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid imagination.

He differs, however, from them in the quality of his fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references; frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often in lubricities of the Félicien Rops kind.