The Defeat of the Count of Marsin near the Bruges Canal

This canvas is one link in a chain of work that ended on a loom. The royal Gobelins workshops in Paris were weaving the History of the King, a set of tapestries celebrating the early years of Louis XIV's reign, and this sketch prepares the twelfth piece. Charles Le Brun, the king's first painter, drew the figures and van der Meulen the landscape, on a large sheet that is also in the Louvre. From that drawing van der Meulen painted this smaller version in oil, about 80 centimetres wide. Another painter, Pierre de Sève, then blew it up into the full-size cartoon the weavers followed, more than five and a half metres wide, which now hangs at Versailles.

The fight itself happened on 31 August 1667, at the end of the king's campaign in Flanders. French troops under the marshals de Bellefonds and de Créqui defeated a Spanish force commanded by the comte de Marsin near the canal at Bruges. The sketch was still at the Gobelins in 1691 and came to the Louvre in 1785.