Jan Wyck was one of a small group of Dutch painters who came to England after the Restoration; he accompanied his father, Thomas, and remained in England until his death. In 1672 the French invaded the Low Countries (having formed an alliance with the British) and the Dutch Republic was again fighting for its life as it had during the Eighty Years War (1568-1648). On this occasion the French were beaten back by the desperate measure of breaching the dykes and flooding the country; by 1674 the threat had passed and the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678 left Dutch borders unchanged (though France made substantial gains from the Spanish Netherlands). After the declaration of war on the 6th April 1672, the French army under the command of Louis XIV’s himself, with Turenne and Condé, passed through Liège and up the Rhine, by-passing the Dutch fortress at Maastricht. On the 12 June 1672 they crossed the Rhine at Betuwe (not far from Arnhem) and invaded the Dutch Republic itself. This canvas depicts this historic moment – for Rhine read Rubicon. The crossing takes place in the middle distance while the foreground is taken up with a minor rather squalid incident: a French cavalry officer, the Duc de Longueville (seen on the white charger to the right), has shot a surrendering Dutch officer and is himself shot in return - a private duel without honour. The idea that the great moments of battle are meaningless melees of essentially anonymous soldiery is perhaps a development of the ‘battle without hero’ a type of painting seen, for example, in Philips Wouwermans’s ‘Skirmish of Cavalry’ of c. 1646 (CW 243, 404533). But how strange to make such a treatment the main incident in a painting five metres wide, the scale of the grandest form of history painting. This was presumably a Dutch commission and may be intended to suggest that the French army in general, for all its pomp, will experience the same come-uppance as Longueville; it is suggestive for example that the fatal shot comes from behind a flag marked with the name ‘Hollandia’. A work of this scale was clearly originally intended for a civic hall or aristocratic palace. It may have been commissioned by or for William III, who was made Captain-General of the Dutch army in response to this crisis and who could be said to have saved his country in 1672, exactly as his grandfather had a century previously. In so doing he also revived the fortunes of the House of Orange and became the prime foe of Louis XIV, a role he had more scope to develop when he became King of Great Britain in 1688. Unfortunately there is no evidence of the original commissioning or location of this work.