A cavalry battle outside a castle, a town beyond

This picture is one of five large cavalry battle and two sea battle scenes at Weissenhaus. The other six pictures were incorporated into the decorative scheme of the dining-room at Weissenhaus in 1895 after most of the old house was destroyed by fire. Although the compositions of those pictures seem to suggest that they consisted of two pairs and one picture which has since been cut in two to fit the decoration, the present picture is an independent composition and was not incorporated into the decoration of the house. The location of the pictures is not recorded before the fire (which was allegedly caused by a shaving mirror left in the sun by a guest; H. von Rumohr, Schlösser und Herrenhäuser in Ostholstein, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, p. 261); it is possible that they were already in the collection of the family when Graf Georg Ludwig von Platen Hallermund bought the old Weissenhaus in 1735. The other possibility is that they were at Weissenhaus before then, either when it was owned from 1729-35 by the Freiherr von Liliencron, or before 1729 by the Grafen Rantzau.

Formerly attributed to Jacques Courtois, il Borgognone, the cavalry battles should instead be compared stylistically with the early work of Simonini. However, the old attribution is understandable, for Simonini was influenced by Courtois: he trained under Pier Ilario Spolverini, but probably soon moved to Florence whilst still a young man, where he studied Courtois' paintings, copying twenty-four of his battle scenes. The two pictures with a port and shipping are rare, in terms of subject, in Simonini's work; they do, however, compare closely with the port scene in a private collection illustrated by Egidio Martini, La pittura Veneziana del Settecento, Venice, 1964, pl. 225.