The Night Watch hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in the Night Watch Room at the end of the Gallery of Honour. It has been in the museum since the building opened in 1885.
That wall was never part of Rembrandt's plan. He painted the picture in 1642 for a very different room, and in the centuries since it has been cut, moved and hidden.
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Rembrandt never saw that wall. The Rijksmuseum opened more than two centuries after his death, and by then the painting had already lived in three other buildings.
It was painted for a hall that no longer exists. Since then it has been cut down, sent away from the city and moved out of its own museum. I find that harder to shake than any single scar. A painting this famous looks like a fixed point, and it never was one.
On a museum map, the answer is one room. On a map of Amsterdam, it is a trail: the hall of a guard company, the Town Hall on the Dam, the Trippenhuis, and only then the Rijksmuseum.
Where did Rembrandt first hang it?
In the Great Hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters of one of Amsterdam's civic guard companies, the Kloveniers, who were musketeers. Their captain, Frans Banninck Cocq, is the man in black at the center of the canvas. Rembrandt delivered it to that hall in 1642.
It hung there until 1715. Then the building lost the painting, and in the early 1880s it lost everything else. The whole complex was demolished and the Doelen Hotel went up on the site. The hotel still has part of the old walls and foundations built into it.
I think that makes the hotel a better answer to where The Night Watch belongs than the museum. The painting was made for those walls, and some of them are still standing. Its move to the Town Hall in 1715 cost it part of the canvas.
What You'll Discover
What the Town Hall doors took.
Where it spent the war.
Where it hung while the museum closed.
What the glass room is for.