The siege of a city under Louis XIV

Although the sites of the battle scenes in five gouaches on vellum by Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe, commissioned by Louis XVI for his private apartments at the Château de Versailles and depicting his grandfather’s battles in Flanders, have all been identified (Ypres, Menen, Fontenoy, Lauffeld and Tournai), the site of the present view has not yet been recognised. According to the inscriptions on the back of the frame, it would represent the siege of Namur, but the topography of the Walloon city is quite different (compare the two gouaches in Versailles, inv. MV 2240 and inv. MV 19354; see X. Salmon, Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe à Versailles. Les gouaches commandées par Louis XVI, Paris, 2005, nos. 14, 15, ill.). The town’s castle on a rocky promontory does not appear in the present work.

Some of the animated scenes in the foreground are more often used by Blarenberghe in his representations of sieges, in particular the detail of the camp scene on the left where soldiers at rest stand in front of two tents, which can be found on a gouache dated 1760 (private collection; see M. Maillet-Chassagne and I. de Château-Thierry, Catalogue raisonné des œuvres des Van Blarenberghe, 1680-1826, Lille, 2004, p. 182, no. 2-120-2, ill.).

Here, the artist worked in his preferred medium. On a vellum stretched over panel, he uses a brush or a broad brush to depict the skies, while the figures are painted with greater precision (Salmon, op. cit., pp. 5-6, 11).