Cavalry Skirmish on a Riverbank

In December 1798 the French forced King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia to give up his mainland states, and the court left Turin. The next year paintings from the royal palace were sent to Paris, and this cavalry skirmish was among them. It spent the Napoleonic years in the Louvre and came back to Turin only after Napoleon's fall. Wouwerman painted it around 1650 to 1655, a decade or more before the skirmish by a bridge that now hangs near it in Sala 33, so the room holds an early and a late picture of the same subject. Here riders clash on a riverbank under a sky clouded with gunsmoke, and no particular battle is meant. Wouwerman was then in his thirties and working in Haarlem, the town where he spent his whole career.