The image of Gustav II Adolf (1594–1632) struck down in the saddle became a powerful motif in European art of the 1630s and 1640s, particularly among Dutch painters. Although only a handful of works on this theme survive, including examples by Jan Asselijn (1610–1652), they reveal how quickly the death of the Swedish king was transformed into a visual symbol of Protestant sacrifice in the Thirty Years’ War. One curious detail persists: while seventeenth-century Dutch art often rendered the king’s horse as white, his mount at Lützen, Streiff, was in fact a chestnut.
Streiff was perhaps the most celebrated European horse of the first half of the seventeenth century. An Oldenburger, he had been purchased by Gustav II Adolf from Colonel Johan Streiff von Lauenstein for the considerable sum of 1,000 riksdaler. At the Battle of Lützen on 16 November 1632, Streiff carried the king into combat. The monarch fell fatally wounded, while the horse, shot through the neck, managed to return riderless to Swedish lines. He died of his injuries in Wolgast a month or two later, but his body was brought to Sweden as a relic of the fallen king.
The preservation of Streiff was not without precedent. Gustav Adolf’s adversary at Lützen, Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634), had his horse Mein Gott (‘My God’) taxidermied, and another of Gustav Adolf’s mounts, a grey lost at Ingolstadt in 1632, was also preserved. All three remain extant. Streiff’s hide was treated by the pharmacist Kasten Meyener with alum, salt, and flour before being mounted on a wooden frame. Today, the horse survives at the Livrustkammaren in Stockholm, displayed with the richly ornamented saddle given to Gustav II Adolf by Queen Maria Eleonora in 1630. The mounted form still bears the visible gunshot wound in its neck, a lasting reminder of the battle in which Sweden’s king lost his life.
