The Recapture of San Juan de Puerto Rico

Eugenio Caxés died in December 1634 with this canvas begun and unfinished, which is why the museum gives it a span of years rather than a date, 1634 to 1635. The rest is on paper. In March 1635 the painter Antonio Puga declared that he had been working in Caxés's house on the battle pictures ordered for the throne room of Philip IV's new Buen Retiro palace, and that April Luis Fernández, who had trained with Caxés, was paid 800 reales for finishing what his master left begun. The Spanish art historians Angulo and Pérez Sánchez went further and suggested that even the composition may have come from another court painter, Vicente Carducho.

The action is from the autumn of 1625, when a Dutch fleet under Boudewijn Hendricksz took the town of San Juan de Puerto Rico and the governor, Juan de Haro, held the harbour fortress of El Morro with a few hundred men until the Dutch burned the town and sailed. Haro stands in the foreground. Nearly two centuries later the picture was one of 50 chosen for the Musée Napoléon, the name the Louvre carried under the empire. It came back from France in June 1816 and entered the museum's collection in 1827.