Jan van Chełmiński

Jan van Chełmiński (1851–1925) was a Polish painter who specialised in Napoleonic military scenes and, above all, in horses. He trained in Munich and worked in London and New York, where he became a sought-after painter of military subjects and equestrian portraits.

His best-known project is the illustrated work on the army of the Duchy of Warsaw, for which he documented uniforms and equipment of the Polish units under Napoleon in meticulous detail. That documentary precision, combined with an unusually confident hand for horses in motion, is what distinguishes his battle scenes from the more theatrical historical painting of his time.

Chełmiński repeatedly returned to the retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1812 – a subject that Polish painters treated as their own, because Polish troops fought and died under Napoleon's eagles.