Crusade Knights in Winter — Print & Oil Painting

Snow is the medium here as much as the subject. It is thrown up in clods by the hooves, hangs in the air as flecks of raw white paint, and covers the ground so completely that the horizon has disappeared. Something like four fifths of the canvas is one shade of white or another.

Out of that comes the charge. A grey horse at full gallop fills the centre, forelegs already off the ground, its rider low over the neck with a lance levelled and a mail coif under a rounded helm with a nose guard. Two more riders press in from the left, a brown horse crosses at the right, and beyond them the column is nothing but banners and lance points.

The banners are where the picture becomes specific. Several carry a red cross on white, the device the Templars were granted in the twelfth century, and one near the centre carries a black cross on white, worn by the Teutonic Order from 1205.

Winter suits the second of those far better than the first. The Teutonic campaigns in the Baltic were fought mostly in the cold months, because frozen marshes and rivers were the only usable roads into the forest, so crusaders in deep snow belong to Prussia and Lithuania rather than to the Holy Land.

The brushwork is fast and loose, and only the leading horse is given sharp edges. One of the loudest pictures in our Knight & Crusade collection, and a study in contrast with the frontal knight under a sky of gold, which uses the same red cross for something entirely motionless.