Trumpet players, from the Riding School cycle

This engraving of three trumpet players riding their horses belongs to a cycle of 22 prints depicting cavalry. De Gheyn prepared the drawn designs, let his assistants execute the engravings and then issued the whole cycle. Unlike The Exercise of Arms, which he must have also begun at the end of the 1590s and which took him ten years to finish, the Riding School was celebratory and perhaps allegorical, rather than didactic. The depictions include weapons that were, by then, already out of use, suggesting that some of the scenes may be intentionally anachronistic.