Jan van Huchtenburgh
1647–1733 · Dutch Republic · Baroque, Dutch Golden Age, Equestrian painting
The story
Around 1708 or 1709 Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Habsburg general who with the Duke of Marlborough had beaten the French at Blenheim, took a painter from Amsterdam into his service. Jan van Huchtenburgh was then past 60. For the prince he painted a series of ten large battle pictures of Eugene's victories, now in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, the capital of the prince's family, the house of Savoy. He also engraved the same battles for an illustrated history of Eugene's campaigns.
He had been preparing for that work most of his life. Born in Haarlem in 1647, he is thought to have trained with Thomas Wijck, a Haarlem painter of genre scenes. Around 1667 he set out to join his elder brother Jacob in Rome and seems never to have got there. He stopped in Paris instead and worked for several years at the Gobelins, the royal tapestry works, under Adam Frans van der Meulen, the Flemish painter who followed Louis XIV's armies and painted his battles.
Back in the Dutch Republic he settled in Amsterdam, where besides painting he made mezzotints, published prints and dealt in art. He died there in 1733, at about 86.
