Cavalry Engagement

Pieter Post signed and dated this panel P.I. Post 1631, when he was in his early twenties and still working as a painter in Haarlem. A few years later he turned to architecture, and with Jacob van Campen he designed the Mauritshuis, the house in The Hague that now owns this picture, and later the palace of Huis ten Bosch for the stadholder's wife, Amalia of Solms.

Battle pieces like this belong to his first years as a painter. Horsemen clash in open country, the kind of small skirmish Haarlem painters were turning out while the Dutch Republic was at war with Spain. The panel is about 35 by 53 centimetres. It hangs in the Mauritshuis's Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof, a few minutes' walk from the building its painter designed.