Emphasis in art is the way a painter makes one part of a picture catch the eye before anything else, usually by setting it apart from its surroundings with light, color, placement or isolation. The painting where it is easiest to see is Rembrandt's The Night Watch, finished in 1642 and now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where a few lit figures stand out from a mass of dark ones.
The Getty Museum's teaching material puts the idea in two plain sentences. Emphasis is "the part of the design that catches the viewer's attention," and the artist usually makes one area stand out by contrasting it with the others. Painters have a small set of ways to do that, and Rembrandt uses several of them at once.
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The light in The Night Watch looks like a single decision, made by Rembrandt in 1642 and left untouched ever since. That is only partly true.
The darkness that makes the lit figures glow is deeper than what the first viewers saw, the name that tells everyone to read the picture as a night scene was given long after Rembrandt died, and the canvas on the wall today is smaller than the one he delivered.
Even so, the lit figures have held the eye for centuries. How Rembrandt earned that attention is worth taking apart one choice at a time, because each choice shows a different way of making the eye stop.
Why is The Night Watch not really a night scene?
Because the title is not Rembrandt's…
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