Joseph Parrocel

In 1676 Joseph Parrocel was received into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris with a picture of Louis XIV directing the siege of Maastricht, and battles remained his trade. Contemporaries called him Parrocel des Batailles, Parrocel of the battles. For the king he painted military scenes for the soldiers' refectories at the Hôtel des Invalides, eleven battle pictures for the royal apartments at Versailles in the later 1680s, and in 1699 the crossing of the Rhine for the château of Marly.

He came from Brignoles in Provence and from a family of painters, and learned first from his father, Barthélemy. In Rome, where he worked for several years from about 1667, he studied with Jacques Courtois, the celebrated battle painter known in Italy as il Borgognone. Parrocel also painted religious subjects and scenes of everyday life such as fairs and taverns, the side of his work seen in a Tavern Scene at the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest. His son and pupil Charles Parrocel carried the family's battle painting into the reign of Louis XV.