Esaias van de Velde Amsterdam 1587 - 1630 The Hague

Prior to his move to The Hague in 1618, Esaias van de Velde does not seem to have represented battle scenes, but thereafter these subjects feature regularly amongst his paintings and drawings, particularly so after the ending of the Twelve Years' Truce, in 1621. The resumption of the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the United Provinces must rapidly have brought back to the surface public thoughts of the regular battles, skirmishes and other sorts of lawlessness that had impinged upon daily life so much during the years either side of 1600, and this in turn surely fuelled demand for pictures of such scenes.

Esaias was not the first artist from the Netherlands to depict these subjects - Sebastian Vrancx in particular is an important precursor, and also David Vinckboons - but unlike most of his Flemish predecessors, Esaias hardly ever chose identifiable historical events as his subjects.  Instead, he concentrated on more generalised scenes, in an approach to the description of the world around him that in fact closely parallels the general developments taking place in Dutch landscape art during the first quarter of the 17th century.   Esaias' paintings of this type clearly found great popularity, as did his drawings, which were mostly, like the present example, large, signed and dated sheets, made not as preparatory studies for paintings, but rather as independent, finished works of art.   Their influence was long-lasting, spawning generations of specialist battle painters, from Van de Velde's nephew, Jan Martsen the Younger, and his pupil Pieter de Neyn, right through to later artists such as Philips Wouwerman, Jan van Huchtenburg and Adam Frans van der Meulen.

In his 1984 monograph on the artist, Keyes analysed in depth this aspect of the artist's work, listing some 40 paintings and 30 drawings of military and related subjects (see Keyes, op. cit., pp. 103-115, 125-134, 215-223, cat. nos. 20-58, D 7-D 35).