(Haarlem 1647–1733 Amsterdam)
The Battle of Chiari: Prince Eugen of Savoy beats the French troops under the Duke of Villeroy at the river Oglio near Chiari,
inscribed lower right: BATTAILLE. CHIARI / A. 1701,
oil on canvas, 91 x 115 cm, unframed

Provenance:
with Galleria Pietro Accorsi, Turin;
sale, Della Rocca, Turin, 2 December 2009, lot 340 (as Jan van Huchtenburg);
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 18 April 2012, lot 533 (as Jan van Huchtenburg);
Private European collection

The present painting relates to the composition by Jan van Huchtenburg in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin (inv. no. 887).

The Battle of Chiari was fought on 1 September 1701 between the Austrian troops under Prince Eugene of Savoy and the Franco-Spanish-Savoyard alliance under the commandership of François de Neufville, Duke of Villeroy during the War of the Spanish Succession. The Austrian imperialists gained an enormous victory and could successfully seize the Spanish controlled Duchy of Milan.

Here, Prince Eugene is shown in the foreground, almost at the centre, issuing orders to his adjutants. Prince Eugene of Savoy (Paris 1663–1736 Vienna) was a great military strategist but also a passionate art lover, patron and collector, he created an extraordinary collection of paintings destined to decorate his summer residence, the Belvedere Palace in Vienna and other residences he owned. After his death, the picture collection was for the most part acquired by Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy, and thus incorporated in the Royal collections in Turin. During his youth in Paris, Prince Eugene had the opportunity to admire the great battle scenes commissioned by the court of Louis XIV from the best artists of the time for the Palace of Versailles, such as, the frescoes for the Ambassadors’ Staircase, painted between 1677 and 1678 by Adam Frans van der Meulen after a design by Charles Le Brun (the frescoes were destroyed in the mid-18th century), or the decoration of the famous Gallery of Mirrors, another work by Le Brun, completed in 1681.

When it came to choosing a painter to accompany him on his military campaigns of 1708–1709, Prince Eugene’s choice fell on Jan van Huchtenburg, a Dutch artist who in the last years of the 17th century had worked under Le Brun and van der Meulen at the court of Louis XIV, as also in the Parisian tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins. Eugene of Savoy’s most important commission to van Huchtenburg was for the canvases which now hang in the Galleria Sabauda. The artist painted them between 1712 and 1717, bringing together the 17th-century tradition of crowded and agitated battle-scenes, with the commander in the foreground and the older tradition of the bird’s-eye view, providing at the same time a detailed representation of the events, and a compelling celebration of the victorious commander.

At the time of Prince Eugene’s death, this large pictorial cycle was listed in the inventory as present in the antechamber of the ceremonial rooms of Schloss Hof, purchased by the prince in 1725, however, its original place of display remains unknown; it is possible that initially it hung in the Belvedere in Vienna.

The series of Eugene of Savoy’s battles by van Huchtenburg enjoyed a great success throughout Europe, also thanks to the engravings that the artist himself derived from the paintings in order to illustrate the Batailles gagnées par le serenissime prince Fr. Eugène sur les ennemis de la foi [...] dépeintes et gravées en Taille-douce, published in The Hague in 1720, and re-edited several times during the 18th century.