from the 1650s depicted scenes of fighting horsemen. Like Snayers he frequently represented a village under attack. These works relish in the depiction of the whirling melee of horsemen and horses itself, as if in distant response to Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. After moving to France and becoming the official war artist of Louis XIV during the multiple military French campaigns in Europe of the late 17th century, van der Meulen developed a new approach to his depictions of battles. He excluded the horror and morbid rawness of the events. 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. The characters whom the artist aims to give the key role in the scene are placed on a mound in the foreground, often mounted on horseback to give them more dignity. On a second plane is typically depicted the supposed movement of the troops and in a third and last plane the profile of the city being attacked. The action is depicted in receding planes accentuated by the folds of the terrain, the alternation of zones of shadow and light and the gradual fading of the light, which marks a view towards a city in the distance. The use of the same compositional scheme gives an impression of unity to many of his paintings as only the profile of the city is different. The uniformity of these compositions can be explained by their use for political purposes. Nevertheless, the paintings of the artist were always praised for their beauty and their use for the decoration of the Royal Pavilion of Marly, for the vestibules as well as for the rooms, shows the fully decorative virtue of his animated and varied landscapes. The features of his style are clearly visible in the large cycle of paintings of Les conquêtes du Roi made for the Royal Pavilion of Marly. One of the most popular compositions in this series was the one depicting The crossing of the Rhine on 12 June 1672. Many versions of this composition exist, made with different levels of involvement of his workshop (the Louvre, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Rijksmuseum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palace of Versailles, private collections). The event depicted is the crossing of the Rhine by the French troops