The Night Watch shows a company of Amsterdam militiamen at the instant they are ordered to march. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, in black, tells his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, to start the men moving. What it means is civic pride, painted as an event instead of a lineup.
Rembrandt finished it in 1642 for the banquet hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the musketeers' new headquarters. Group portraits of militias usually stood the men in rows. The Rijksmuseum sums up the break in one line: Rembrandt was the first to paint the figures of a group portrait actually doing something.
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A second story is told almost as often. The men hated what they got, and the painting began Rembrandt's ruin. It turns the picture into a revenge, a painter mocking the customers who paid him.
The record says otherwise. The Rijksmuseum calls the painting the crowning achievement and turning point of his career. Artnet News writes that, contrary to popular myth, the painting was not rejected by its commissioners, and that Rembrandt was paid handsomely.
The truth is odder. A picture admired in its own time later darkened until no one remembered what it showed, and it picked up a name that has nothing to do with it. The clues are in the painting.
What is going off next to the lieutenant?
A musket. A helmeted man fires his weapon close beside Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, and according to Artnet News a plume of smoke once wafted around the captain's head before the paint deteriorated and it disappeared. Nothing in the scene is posed. A drummer beats time, a dog barks, and the men load and aim at different angles.
The order itself rides on a hand. Banninck Cocq's raised hand casts a shadow across the lieutenant's coat, and the Rijksmuseum notes that Rembrandt used light to focus on that gesture. "The captain, dressed in black, is telling his lieutenant to start the company marching," the museum writes. "The guardsmen are getting into formation."
Behind them, the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen carries the flag. The National Gallery in London, which holds a small copy of the painting, names him and believes Banninck Cocq himself probably ordered that copy. I doubt a man who wanted his own small version of the scene was ashamed of it.
Rembrandt had staged a group as an event before, in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, with a dissection. Here he did it with a whole company. And in the middle of the armed men stands one figure who carries no weapon at all.
What You'll Discover
Who the girl in gold stands for.
Who paid and who only posed.
Who said it needed more light.
Why the name is wrong.