Philip, a very excellent Dutch painter, of whose personal history hardly anything is known, was born at Haarlem in 1620. He received his first lessons in painting from his father, who was an obscure historical painter, and from Peter Verbeeck, who aided him in composition and colouring. The Dutch biographers, and Houbraken among the number, who has written such a fabulous life of Wouwerman, all agree in making him a pupil of Jan Wyntans, but it is difficult to see what he could have learned from that elegant landscape painter. Wouwerman's subjects are hunting, fighting, plundering, travelling and roadside parties, all in exceedingly picturesque attire. The skies, the water, the foliage, and the foreground of his pictures, are all exquisitely managed. They are fine in composition; transparent in colour; and the whole is admirably handled.

Wouwerman had wonderful powers of application and expedition. When we reflect that he painted every inch of between seven and eight hundred pictures with his own hand, we may be able to form some adequate idea of his amazing facility of touch, and of the extreme amount of labour which he must have bestowed upon the execution of his pictures. Some say that he led an obscure and poor life, selling his paintings to picture-dealers for what they would bring. Others, again, inform us that he was a modest man of genius, who husbanded his earnings, and gave his daughter a dowry of nearly £2000. Unfortunately, there is no more luminous authority to cast those conflicting lights into the shade. Wouwerman died in 1668, at the age of forty-eight.