Battle Scene

Van der Meulen entered the service of Louis XIV on 1 April 1664, and the gallery dates this canvas to about a year later. The king had not yet begun a war of his own. That came in 1667, when French troops marched into the Spanish Netherlands on a claim Louis took up after Philip IV of Spain died in September 1665. So a fight on this scale, a canvas just over two metres wide, was something the painter had to compose rather than witness. He fell back on the kind of picture he had learned in Brussels, where at 14 he was apprenticed to Pieter Snayers, a painter of cavalry skirmishes and sieges. The Athens record stays vague in the same way: no place, no named engagement, and a date given only as around 1665.