Tavern Scene

Joseph Parrocel was the great battle painter of Louis XIV's France. He filled the walls of the Invalides and the royal palaces with the king's sieges and cavalry charges, smoke, rearing horses, the whole machinery of war. A tavern scene like this belongs to the other side of that same soldier's world. When the fighting stopped, troops halted at wayside inns to drink, water the horses and wait, and a painter raised on the battlefield knew these figures well. Parrocel had learned his trade in Rome under Jacques Courtois, the leading battle specialist of the century. The crowded knots of men and animals he mastered there serve just as easily for a noisy tavern as for a cavalry charge.