Early in his career Philips Wouwerman specialized in expressive depictions of military encounters; he was not, however, a romantic who idealized warfare. Even though he included all of war’s heroic accoutrements in this painting—trumpet, drum, flags, and colorful sashes worn by brave soldiers—he portrayed the battlefield as a deadly and messy milieu where clear divisions between friend and foe are impossible to establish. This skirmish unfolds on the side of an ordinary sandy dune, so undistinguished in appearance that it reinforces the impression that such human slaughter occurs without any significance or relevance to the larger course of human affairs. Smoke and dust billowing from the tumult largely obscure the distant landscape and the mounted soldiers who are arriving to join the battle from beyond the crest of the hill. To judge from the Dutch flag at the right and the red sash worn by the central rider brandishing his trumpet in the air, the skirmish is between Dutch and Spanish soldiers. Nevertheless, the immediate circumstances that have pitted these forces against each other, the eventual outcome of the battle, and the consequences for the victor and the vanquished are unknown and of no apparent interest to the artist.
The battle rages right before us, and there is no escape from its furor. As the horses of the mounted soldiers rear their hoofs over the dead and maimed, armed combatants grimace as they try to subdue their enemy. With swords and knives raised to cause yet more bloodshed, and rifles and pistols firing to kill, there is no end in sight to the carnage. Wouwerman focused his composition on four riders and their steeds struggling for survival in the vortex of the battle: a horseman wearing a red sash who holds aloft his trumpet; a rider with an orange sash on a white mount that jumps over a third horse whose rider has fallen onto the ground with a gaping wound on the back of his head; and, most menacing of all, a fierce warrior who is about to decapitate his Dutch adversary with his drawn sword. At the far left is a lone figure of a wounded drummer, clutching the profusely bleeding stump of his right arm. With his now useless drum lying abandoned on the ground before him, he fearfully tries to escape from the violence.
Wouwerman’s ability to capture the heat of battle was one of the most celebrated aspects of his extensive oeuvre. Cornelis de Bie wrote in 1661 that Wouwerman’s battle scenes were so lifelike that Nature could not make them any more perfect. At the beginning of the following century Arnold Houbraken was even more enthusiastic in his admiration of Wouwerman’s ability to paint “fiery passion flashing from the eyes of man and rider, fear in those who flee, pain in the maimed, and the hue of death painted on the lips of the slain.” Whether Wouwerman conceived such battle scenes entirely from his imagination or actually witnessed such human brutality is not known. By the mid-1640s, when he painted this work, Spanish and Dutch forces were no longer fighting in the Province of Holland. Perhaps the young artist had witnessed battles when he was in Germany in 1638–1639, as conflicts between these enemies were still actively being waged there at that time. Whatever the source of his inspiration, Wouwerman’s battle scenes greatly appealed to Dutch and Flemish collectors, who paid high prices for these works.
This painting is one of a number of comparable works Wouwerman made relatively early in his career. In each of them he situated a skirmish on the side of a sandy dune, a diagonal terrain that added to the battle’s dynamic intensity. Although these paintings are largely monochromatic, Wouwerman gave pictorial focus to his images with a few carefully positioned accents of color and light. In this instance, he drew attention to the three central riders circling one another, the fallen wounded soldier, and the dead man dressed in red and blue. He probably composed his paintings with the aid of now-lost preliminary drawings, for similar, although never identical, figures and horses appear in a number of his works. The rearing horse carrying the trumpeter in this painting, for example, is comparable to one in Wouwerman’s Attack on a Convoy, 1644 [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Philips Wouwerman, Attack on a Convoy, 1644, oil on panel, Sammlungen des Fürsten von und zu Liechtenstein, Vaduz-Vienna. He must also have made counterproofs of these drawings: a mirror image of the white steed in the National Gallery of Art’s painting appears as a bay horse with a white blaze in a comparable battle scene in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Philips Wouwerman, Battle Scene, c. 1645, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A long tradition of battle scenes in Dutch art gave Wouwerman a pictorial framework for his own compositions. Nevertheless, when one compares Battle Scene with depictions of skirmishes by the Haarlem master Esaias van de Velde I (Dutch, 1587 - 1630) or by Palamedes Palamedesz (1607–1638) from Delft, it is evident that Wouwerman introduced an entirely new intensity to the battlefield genre. Whereas the action in these earlier scenes seems stilted and frozen, Wouwerman made it come alive, not only through his compositional mastery but also through his ability to depict the sense of movement in both horses and humans.
It seems probable that Wouwerman’s dynamic vision of men and horses in the midst of battle drew heavily from non-Dutch pictorial sources, which he would have known primarily through prints. Chief among these predecessors was Antonio Tempesta (Florentine, 1555 - 1630), whose etchings of battle scenes featuring rearing horses and close combat were widely circulated and enormously influential during the early seventeenth century. A number of specific prototypes for Wouwerman’s horses appear in these prints, including the steed carrying the trumpeter in the National Gallery’s painting [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Antonio Tempesta, David Kills Goliath, 1613, etching, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1974.55.33. Another probable source for the dramatic poses of man and beast that characterize Wouwerman’s battle scenes was Sir Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577 - 1640), whose compositions he could have known through prints. Finally, Houbraken notes that Wouwerman acquired a suitcase full of “models, drawings and sketches” from the estate of his fellow painter in Haarlem, Pieter van Laer (Dutch, c. 1592 - 1642). Van Laer, also known as Bamboccio, had spent fourteen years in Rome before returning to Haarlem in 1639. Shortly before Wouwerman died, he purportedly burned Van Laer’s drawings along with his own, so it is impossible to know the extent of Van Laer’s impact on Wouwerman’s art. Nevertheless, the presence of a strongly foreshortened dead soldier in the foreground of this painting raises the possibility that one of Van Laer’s drawings was a copy of Andrea Mantegna (Paduan, c. 1431 - 1506)'s Dead Christ, c. 1490, in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Another possible source for this striking image is Dead Adonis, 1609, by Hendrick Goltzius (Dutch, 1558 - 1617) [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] Hendrick Goltzius, Dead Adonis, 1609, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,. Photo © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
While the earlier provenance of Battle Scene is not known, intriguing hints of its history exist in earlier sale records and from labels on the verso of the panel.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
