Battle between Christians and Turks

The Battle between Christians and Turks attributed to Philips Wouwerman, dated around 1700, may fall after his death in 1668 or be a late attribution in the Wouwerman tradition. Wouwerman was the leading Dutch painter of equestrian subjects and military scenes, and his battle paintings combining cavalry skirmishes with landscape were enormously popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Christians-versus-Turks subject was a specific type reflecting the ongoing Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts that occupied European military imagination from the Battle of Lepanto through the sieges of Vienna.

The battle composition would be organized with the characteristic Wouwerman combination of rearing horses, falling riders, and the churning dust of cavalry combat against a landscape background with atmospheric distance. White horses — Wouwerman's trademark motif — likely provide compositional highlights amid the dark chaos of battle.