Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe

Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe worked on a tiny scale with extraordinary precision. He painted battles, sieges, ports and country houses crowded with hundreds of minute figures, many of them in gouache on the lids of gold snuffboxes made for the French aristocracy.

He came from a family of painters of Flemish origin based in Lille, where he was born in 1716. He became an official campaign painter for the French court, following the army to record its battles, and worked at Versailles with his son Henri-Joseph, who carried on the family speciality. For English-speaking viewers his best-known subject is the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the battle that effectively ended the American War of Independence, which he painted for Louis XVI in the 1780s. Two of these paintings belong to the Palace of Versailles. He died in 1794.

Look into the trenches and camps: every soldier is individually drawn.