Adam Frans van der Meulen

Flemish painter and draughtsman

Adam Frans van der Meulen or Adam François van der Meulen (11 January 163215 October 1690) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman who was particularly known for his scenes of military campaigns and conquests. Van der Meulen also painted portraits, hunting scenes, paintings of chateaux and landscapes. He created designs for prints and cartoons for tapestries. He worked in the service of the French king Louis XIV of France for whom he painted his victories, his new possessions and portraits.

Adam Frans van der Meulen was born in Brussels where he was baptized on 11 January 1632. He was the eldest of the seven children of Pieter van der Meulen and his second wife Maria van Steenwegen. He was also known for depicting courtly retinues mounted on their horses. His reputation for this type of scene as well as his skill in the painting of horses reached France. This led to the artist being called to Paris where he entered into the service of Louis XIV on 1 April 1664. The court painter (Premier peintre du roi) Charles Le Brun had been put in charge of the Gobelins Manufactory, the royal tapestry works newly created in 1663, and was officially appointed its director on 8 March 1663. To realize Colbert's project of a series of tapestries on the king's military campaigns, Le Brun sought to surround himself with a team of painters who would be capable of translating his ideas into tapestries and van der Meulen was recruited to assist Le Brun in this project. Van der Meulen's reputation as a skilled painter of horses has been cited as one of the reasons why he was solicited to work in France. When van der Meulen worked on the design of 12 Gobelins representing the months for King Louis XIV, van der Meulen executed the smaller figures and part of the landscapes while the remainder of the landscapes was completed by Boudewijns and Abraham Genoels, another Flemish painter active in Paris. While in Paris, Boudewijns also engraved many of van der Meulen's compositions. Boudewijns married the sister of van der Meulen called Barbe or Barbara on 12 January 1670. Van der Meulen's career in France took off rapidly. His annual wages at the Gobelins Manufactory were regularly increased and he was in 1666 one of its best paid artists. He accompanied le Grand Condé during his campaign through Bourgogne Franche Comté. Marly was a new pleasure residence built for the King as an architectural fantasy, with twelve little pavilions and elegant Royal Pavilion laid out on a square plan. The four apartments of the pavilion were separated by vestibules with as only decoration two marble tables with above them two large paintings of The King's Conquests by van der Meulen. Van der Meulen was commissioned by Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier to create smaller replicas of his paintings of conquests to decorate the Château de Choisy (1680 1688), and then by Louvois to decorate the Château de Meudon.

Van der Meulen was one of the foremost battle painters of his time. He is also known for his many topographical drawings, which he made as preparations for his battle pieces. He painted equestrian portraits and painted and drew many animal studies. Rather than concentrate on the heat of the action from close up, he used the compositional device of a crowded elevated foreground behind which there is a plunging wide panoramic landscape. A similar propagandistic purpose was present in the prints that were made after van der Meulen's designs. The inscriptions underneath the prints made after The King's Conquests were written by Claude François Ménestrier, a French heraldist and Jesuit who was an attendant of the royal court. These inscriptions invariably highlight the direct involvement of the French king in the glorious events being depicted and thus go beyond a simple description of the events. It is clear that the contemporary perception was that these works were made to preserve the memory of the king's military feats for posterity. The engraved portrait of van der Meulen created by Pieter van Schuppen after a painting by Nicolas de Largillière confirms this. Underneath the portrait of the painter appears the following inscription, which does not mention van der Meulen, but rather speaks of the King as a painter: 'C'est de Louis Le Grand le Peintre incomparable, Qui de ses plus beaux faits a peint la verité, Et qui sans le secours des couleurs de la fable, Le Fait Voir ce qu'il est a la Posterité.' ('It is of Louis the Great, the incomparable painter, who has painted the truth with his beautiful deeds and without the aid of the colours of fables, shows what he is to posterity'). The various versions depict the King in the company of different personages although they are placed in the same place in the composition. It is possible that these variations were made at the behest of the patron for whom a particular version was created. Van der Meulen arranged for many of his drawings and paintings representing landscapes and scenes of the military life to be engraved. These were intended for a clientele of private clients. He and later his widow sold the prints from their lodgings at the Gobelin Manufacture. Later he hired publishers and merchants to distribute his prints. He arranged in 1670 for 13 large scale plates representing sieges, the taking of towns and royal castles to be executed for the King's Cabinet. These were acquired by the Crown, which used them to make prints that were published by the Royal Printing Office for collectors in 1679. The painter succeeded in selling to the king in 1685 prints taken from new plates, and then arranged for the sale to the public of a second edition of prints which represented the series of The King's Conquests he had made for Marly.