page_title: Adam Frans van der Meulen
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Adam Frans van der Meulen / Work
context_page_description: Adam Frans van der Meulen or Adam-François van der Meulen was a Flemish painter and draughtsman who was particularly known for his scenes of military campaigns and conquests. Van der Meulen also painted portraits, hunting scenes, paintings of chateaux and landscapes. He created designs for prints and cartoons for tapestries.
  He worked in the service of the French king Louis XIV of France for whom he painted his victories, his new possessions and portraits. He was instrumental in building the propagandistic image of the French king as the 'Sun King'. His battle scenes had an important influence on the development on the genre of military painting in France.
context_section_description: Van der Meulen was one of the foremost battle painters of his time.  He is also known for his many topographical drawings, which he made as preparations for his battle pieces.  He painted equestrian portraits and painted and drew many animal studies. His works always retained their Flemish character in terms of color, although his style was modified by that of the French school.
  The most important portion of van der Meulen's work is made up of battle scenes.  His early works in this genre were close in style to those of his master Pieter Snayers.  These early works from the 1650s depicted scenes of fighting horsemen. Like Snayers he frequently represented a village under attack. These works relish in the depiction of the whirling melee of horsemen and horses itself, as if in distant response to Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari.
  After moving to France and becoming the official war artist of Louis XIV during the multiple military French campaigns in Europe of the late 17th century, van der Meulen developed a new approach to his depictions of battles.  He excluded the horror and morbid rawness of the events. Rather than concentrate on the heat of the action from close up, he used the compositional device of a crowded elevated foreground behind which there is a plunging wide panoramic landscape. The characters whom the artist aims to give the key role in the scene are placed on a mound in the foreground, often mounted on horseback to give them more dignity.  On a second plane is typically depicted the supposed movement of the troops and in a third and last plane the profile of the city being attacked. The action is depicted in receding planes accentuated by the folds of the terrain, the alternation of zones of shadow and light and the gradual fading of the light, which marks a view towards a city in the distance. The use of the same compositional scheme gives an impression of unity to many of his paintings as only the profile of the city is different.  The uniformity of these compositions can be explained by their use for political purposes. Nevertheless, the paintings of the artist were always praised for their beauty and their use for the decoration of the Royal Pavilion of Marly, for the vestibules as well as for the rooms, shows the fully decorative virtue of his animated and varied landscapes.
  The features of his style are clearly visible in the large cycle of paintings of Les conquêtes du Roi made for the Royal Pavilion of Marly. One of the most popular compositions in this series was the one depicting The crossing of the Rhine on 12 June 1672. Many versions of this composition exist, made with different levels of involvement of his workshop (the Louvre, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Rijksmuseum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palace of Versailles, private collections). The event depicted is the crossing of the Rhine by the French troops during the Franco-Dutch War. The crossing did not involve any military engagement with the Dutch troops and solely involved the French troops wading through the Rhine when the water was low. Nevertheless, this event was described in contemporary French propaganda as a feat equal to those of Alexander the Great and Emperor Constantine the Great.  Many writers and visual artists eulogized the French king for this exploit.  The various depictions misrepresent, however, the actual history of the event.  Louis XIV was in fact not present at the crossing of the Rhine as he was at the time staying with his brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans in the monastery in Elterberg. Van der Meulen's paintings of the crossing of the Rhine, which show Louis XIV in the foreground commanding the action are thus a conscious misrepresentation of history for propaganda purposes. 
  In the version in the Louvre van der Meulen has placed Louis XIV at the heart of the event, in the immediate vicinity of danger, thus emphasizing the king's courage and power. The king eclipses the other personages: his brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and le Grand Condé who had planned the maneuver, are pl
caption: The crossing of the Rhine on 12 June 1672
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