Prince Eugene of Savoy as Commander

By the late 1720s Prince Eugene of Savoy was in his sixties, and his great victories over the French and the Ottomans lay years behind him. His summer palace in Vienna, the Belvedere, had been finished in 1723. Auerbach still paints him in the field, in armour with the Order of the Golden Fleece, pointing his baton toward a cavalry fight below a burning fortress. A Black page in a turban holds his helmet, an anonymous stock figure that European nobles added to portraits to show their power. From the 18th century this canvas was in Scotland, at Yester House, seat of the Marquesses of Tweeddale, whose son Lord John Hay had fought alongside Eugene. When the museum bought it at auction in 2016, its director noted that until then it had owned no grand portrait of the man who built the palace.