Adam Frans van der Meulen

When Louis XIV of France went to war, a Flemish painter often rode with the army to record it. Adam Frans van der Meulen, born in Brussels, was brought to Paris in 1664 and installed as battle painter to the king, working under Charles Le Brun, the artist who ran every royal art project of the reign.

His job was documentary and grand at once. He sketched sieges, marching columns and captured towns on the spot, then turned them into large paintings and into designs for the Gobelins workshops, where they were woven into tapestries celebrating the king's conquests. During the campaign of 1667 in Flanders he pleased Louis so thoroughly that from then on he was ordered to accompany him on every expedition.

The result is a careful visual record of a very real war, with the king almost always placed on horseback in the foreground and the besieged city spread out behind. Many of these canvases still hang at Versailles, the palace built to glorify the same reign. Van der Meulen died in Paris in 1690.