The Battle of Waterloo
Jan Willem Pieneman (1779 to 1853) · 1824
The largest painting in the museum, more than eight metres wide, fills an entire wall. On a hill in the centre the Duke of Wellington on his chestnut horse receives the news that the Prussian army is arriving and the day is won. In the foreground, on a stretcher, lies the wounded Prince of Orange, the future King William the Second of the Netherlands, who commanded the Dutch and Belgian troops and was hit in the shoulder. Around them are dozens of officers, each a real portrait, and behind them the battle rolls across the fields under a sky of smoke.
Jan Willem Pieneman was the leading history painter of the Netherlands, and he went about the picture like a journalist. He travelled to London to paint Wellington and his generals from life, visited the battlefield, and made studies of uniforms and horses; the oil sketches for many of the heads survive and some hang nearby. Look at the way he organised a crowd of nearly ninety figures so that the eye moves from the fallen prince, lit like an altarpiece, up to Wellington and out to the horizon. The horses are excellent, the light is theatrical, and the flags and the dead are placed with care.
The painting was finished in 1824 and was so admired that Wellington wanted to buy it. Instead King William the First acquired it for his son, and it hung in the prince's palace before coming to the Rijksmuseum, where a room was built for it. After the museum's ten year renovation the canvas was cleaned and given the wall it has today, with a bench in front where you can sit and pick out the faces. For the Dutch it records the moment when their new kingdom, formed only nine years earlier, proved itself on a European battlefield.
Did You Know? Wellington sat for Pieneman in London and liked the result so much that he tried to buy the painting for himself.
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