Prince Eugene of Savoy was one of the most successful military commanders in European history. The offspring of a minor branch of the royal house of Savoy, he was born and brought up in the court of Louis XIV and spent his life fighting against that monarch in the service of three successive Emperors in Vienna. He was his master’s councillor and diplomat as well as general and a magnificent builder and patron of the arts in this own right. In 1708 Prince Eugene commissioned a series of records of his victories so far from Jan van Huchtenburgh, a Dutch artist in the tradition of Jan Wyck (see CW 262, 404737) and Adam Frans van der Meulen (1632-1690), who like them adapt panoramic topographical landscape to the service of military history. By 1720 Prince Eugene owned a set of ten battle scenes hanging in his country retreat, the Schlosshof, near Vienna (now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin), as well as appearing in engraved form in the account of his victories by Jean Dumont, published in The Hague. This set of six copies or repetitions after these scenes was first recorded at Buckingham Palace in 1876. Nothing is known of their history before this, though they appear to be of reasonable quality, possibly from the artist’s studio, while clearly inferior to the Turin originals. There is no mystery about their appeal to an English audience: Prince Eugene fought alongside the Duke of Marlborough and the two great generals held each other in cordial esteem: Thomas Lediard calls them ‘Twin constellations in glory’. The six battles in the Royal Collection set include three where Marlborough and Prince Eugene fought together – Blenheim, Oudenard and Malplaquet – and one mislabelled as a depiction of Marlborough’s other great victory, Ramilies (in fact depicting the battle of Chiari). The other two are battles fought in Italy without British involvement, but also belonging to the same war, that of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which British and the Empire were allies. The Battle of Blenheim took place on 13 August 1704 between the British and Imperial armies on one side and those of France and Bavaria on the other. The Austro-British victory was the most decisive of the War of the Spanish Succession. On a hill in the right foreground, the Prince, mounted on a white charger, points with his sword towards a sharp cavalry skirmish in the centre, with wounded and dead men and horses lying on the ground; he is accompanied by two cavalrymen.