Van der Meulen's earliest works dealt with the same subject matter as those of his master Snayers, in particular cavalry skirmishes.

[5] The court painter (Premier peintre du roi) Charles Le Brun had been put in charge of the Gobelins Manufactory, the royal tapestry works newly created in 1663, and was officially appointed its director on 8 March 1663.

To realize Colbert's project of a series of tapestries on the king's military campaigns, Le Brun sought to surround himself with a team of painters who would be capable of translating his ideas into tapestries and van der Meulen was recruited to assist Le Brun in this project.

[10] Van der Meulen's reputation as a skilled painter of horses has been cited as one of the reasons why he was solicited to work in France.

[11] When van der Meulen worked on the design of 12 Gobelins representing the months for King Louis XIV, van der Meulen executed the smaller figures and part of the landscapes while the remainder of the landscapes was completed by Boudewijns and Abraham Genoels, another Flemish painter active in Paris.

[2] From 1668 van der Meulen worked on the series of tapestries called the 'Maisons royales' ('Royal Residences') depicting the various palaces of the king.

[2] His paintings representing the campaigns of Flanders in 1667 so delighted the King that from that date van der Meulen was ordered to accompany him on all his expeditions.

[3] Van der Meulen made a total of nine trips to document King Louis XIV's military campaigns.

He enjoyed all kinds of facilities at his job: he had his own coach, took his meals with the officers, and had an assistant called Jean Paul who helped him with the drawings.

The four apartments of the pavilion were separated by vestibules with as only decoration two marble tables with above them two large paintings of The King's Conquests by van der Meulen.

As van der Meulen was an ordinary painter to the King, and resided at the Manufacture des Gobelins, the sovereign ordered a number of works to be seized, which he thought proper to be returned to him.

[9] His pupils and workshop assistants included Saveur Lecomte, Mathieu Dufresnet, Dominicus Nollet, Gérard Jean Baptiste Scotin (II), Nicolas de Largillière, Jan van Huchtenburg, Jean-Baptiste Martin and François Duchatel.

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.

[7] 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.

[18] 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.

[9] 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.

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).

Louis XIV was in fact not present at the crossing of the Rhine as he was at the time staying with his brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans in the monastery in Elterberg.

Van der Meulen's paintings of the crossing of the Rhine, which show Louis XIV in the foreground commanding the action are thus a conscious misrepresentation of history for propaganda purposes.

[10] In the version in the Louvre van der Meulen has placed Louis XIV at the heart of the event, in the immediate vicinity of danger, thus emphasizing the king's courage and power.

The king eclipses the other personages: his brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and le Grand Condé who had planned the maneuver, are placed behind the sovereign.

The inscriptions underneath the prints made after The King's Conquests were written by Claude-François Ménestrier, a French heraldist and Jesuit who was an attendant of the royal court.

('It is of Louis the Great, the incomparable painter, who has painted the truth with his beautiful deeds and without the aid of the colours of fables, shows what he is to posterity').

He also visited the locations of the actions afterwards and spent much time making topographical sketches of the landscapes and cities that were depicted in his battle scenes.

Many of these printmakers came from Flanders and the Dutch Republic such as Adriaen Frans Boudewijns, Abraham Genoels, Jan van Huchtenburg and Romeyn de Hooghe.

[22] Van der Meulen arranged for many of his drawings and paintings representing landscapes and scenes of the military life to be engraved.

[22] He arranged in 1670 for 13 large-scale plates representing sieges, the taking of towns and royal castles to be executed for the King's Cabinet.