Louis Xiv Before Strasbourg

Before a city, on a horse

The title places a ruler in front of a named city. That is a formula rather than a scene: the mounted figure in front, the town behind, and the relation between the two as the whole subject. A horse in such a picture is neither charging nor parading. It is standing, or moving at a walk, while its rider looks at something, which makes it a vantage point more than a mount.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1685 and the location is the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, in Strasbourg, the city named in the title. The dimensions are not recorded. Baroque is the recorded style, Flemish the recorded nationality, and the measured colour family of the image is brown. The record files the work under male portraiture, Animal Art > Horse and a religious heading.

A companion record

This painter's entries here run to 5 in total, 4 of them naming the same ruler, and the dated ones fall in the 1670s and 1680s. Read together they describe a working pattern rather than a set of single occasions. The catalogue supports the pattern. It supplies no narrative to hang on it.