Cavalry Engagement

This battle picture was ordered by a family that had argued against the House of Orange, and it ended up in the Orange prince's collection all the same. Pieter de la Court van der Voort, a wealthy Leiden collector, commissioned it from Jan van Huchtenburgh together with a companion piece, Ambushing a Convoy. His father, also called Pieter de la Court, had been one of the sharpest republican writers of the 17th century, arguing that Holland was better off without a prince of Orange at its head.

The son's heirs kept the two paintings until 1766, when they were bought by Prince William V of Orange. Huchtenburgh signed this one at the lower right with an H and a B joined. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs, like its companion, in the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof.