The Night Watch

The Night Watch, oil on canvas by Rembrandt van Rijn completed in 1642. The painting is to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre in Paris, drawing huge numbers of visitors each year.

The Night Watch, formally known as Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (the painting’s simpler, widely known title, first recorded in 1797, was erroneously given to it due to its thick, dark yellow varnish), is ostensibly a genre scene out of the 17th-century Dutch Baroque. Commissioned in 1640 and painted in 1642, at the height of Rembrandt’s career, this colossal painting, at 12.4 × 14.9 feet (379.5 × 453.5 centimeters), is a commissioned group portrait of a militia company, the civic guard, charged with preventing attacks on Amsterdam. Such portraits traditionally depicted their members in neat rows or at a banquet. Rembrandt’s version, however, makes the prosaic subject into a dynamic work of art; with its masterful chiaroscuro and dramatic action, the conventions of traditional portraiture are overturned.

The Night Watch depicts the captain of the guard leading his lieutenant, dressed in a cream-color uniform, as they round up the uniformed ranks. Only 18 of the 34 characters in the scene are portraits of actual people; the remaining figures are symbolic, such as the young girl in a pale yellow gown, who is traditionally regarded as the mascot of the guard. The illusionism and the sense of theatricality and movement in the painting are enforced by the choreography of gestures, glances, muskets, and banners and by the building up of pigment in the foreground that flattens as the perspective recedes. The painting was originally even larger, but it was cut down in 1715 to fit through the doors in Amsterdam’s town hall, where it was once housed, and those missing pieces have never been found. By mixing charged symbolism—for example, the chicken in the middle of the action, playing on the name Cocq—and reality as well as action and allegory, Rembrandt takes a subject steeped in tradition and creates a masterpiece transcending time and genre.

The Night Watch has enjoyed pride of place in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour from the moment the museum opened in 1885, barring the years of World War II. During that period the painting was hidden in a coastal bunker and, later, in the caves of St. Pietersburg in Maastricht in southeastern Netherlands.