Van Hillegaert depicted two of Prince Maurits’s martial exploits in his oeuvre: the disbanding of the Utrecht mercenaries in 1618 (SK-A-155) and the Battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600, the subject of this painting. Although the battle brought Maurits great fame, it was of little strategic value, for he was forced to retreat from the southern Netherlands after the victory, nullifying his success.
In his characteristic way, Van Hillegaert shows the mounted Maurits in the left foreground on a dark ridge, behind which the battle unfolds in a panoramic landscape. The artist took great care over the scene, not just in the execution but also in the many anecdotal details, like the horse biting a fleeing man in the shoulder in the centre foreground. There is a certain ambitiousness in details like the foreshortening of the fallen soldier in the centre middle ground. The numerous lances in the background, which far exceed the number of soldiers and have a decorative function, can be regarded as the artist’s trademark, and are often found in his other works (see, for example, SK-A-155, SK-A-3125). The realistic, occasionally comical details recall the work of Adriaen van de Venne, who later depicted the same subject in a tapestry design.
Dendrochronology of the panel has demonstrated that the painting can be placed late in the artist’s oeuvre. The earliest possible date is 1632, but it is more likely that it was executed in or after 1638.
In the estate of Anneken Hoomis, Van Hillegaert’s widow, was a ‘Battle of Flanders’ which she wanted to keep for herself and did not bequeath to her son and heir, Francois van Hillegaert. Unfortunately it is impossible to discover whether it was this painting.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 129.
