Bandits holding up Travellers
Adam Frans van der Meulen (Brussels 1632 - Paris 1690)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1657
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
890 x 1380 mm
Place of origin
France
Order this imageCollection
Petworth House and Park, West Sussex
NT 486165
Caption
Van der Meulen was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialised in battle scenes. He was trained by the court artist, Pieter Snayers, in Brussels. During the first fifteen years of his career, the so-called Brussels period, he painted small-scale genre and history scenes with political and military events in the Baroque style of Sebastiaen Vrancx, Pieter Snayers, and Jan Breughel the elder. In 1666 he was called to Paris by the finance minister Jean Colbert, at the request of Charles Le Brun, to fill the post of battle painter to Louis XIV. He accompanied the King on campaigns, sketching in the field, and later elaborating his studies in the studio to make paintings or cartoons for tapestries to be produced by Gobelins. He was appointed to an elevated position within the Académie.
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Bandits holding up Travellers by Adam Frans van der Meulen (Brussels 1632 – Paris 1690). 1657. A group of mounted bandits in the left foreground and at right, three hooded wagons attacked by robbers against a woody background.
Provenance
According to Collins Baker, probably bought at the vicomte de Calonne Sale, 3rd day, March 1795, lot 21; thence by descent, until the death in 1952 of the 3rd Lord Leconfield, who had given Petworth to the National Trust in 1947, and whose nephew and heir, John Wyndham, 6th Lord Leconfield and 1st Lord Egremont (1920-72) arranged for the acceptance of the major portion of the collections at Petworth in lieu of death duties (the first ever such arrangement) in 1956 by H.M.Treasury.
Credit line
Petworth, The Egremont Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
A.F.V. MEULEN. FECIT 1657 (inscription reproduced exactly from Collins Baker)
Makers and roles
Adam Frans van der Meulen (Brussels 1632 - Paris 1690), artist