Rembrandt's The Night Watch, finished in 1642, turned a job that usually produced rows of stiff portraits into a scene in motion. The sitters were a militia company of Amsterdam, and Rembrandt painted them setting off: a captain giving the order to march, muskets being loaded and fired, a drummer, a barking dog.
Over this crowd he laid a light that picks out some faces and leaves others in shadow. It is probably the most famous painting in the Netherlands, and its name is a puzzle of its own, since the scene takes place in daylight.
In Amsterdam at the time, the civic guards were companies of citizens who trained with weapons to defend their city. Each company had its own headquarters with a banquet hall, and it decorated the walls with group portraits of its members.
Since each man paid for his place, about a hundred guilders, painters lined the members up in rows under an even light, every face as visible as the next.
Rembrandt had already broken with that habit once. In The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, from 1632, a group of Amsterdam doctors gathers around a body while Dr. Tulp explains the muscles of its dissected arm, so that the portrait looks like a lesson caught in progress.
Around 1639 the Kloveniers, the city's musketeers, asked him for a group portrait of their own. It was to hang in the banquet hall of their new headquarters, the Kloveniersdoelen.
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The canvas is huge, nearly 12 feet high and more than 14 feet wide. At the front, two officers walk toward the viewer: a captain in black with a red sash and, beside him, his lieutenant in yellow with a white sash. Farther back, among the musketeers, a small girl in gold stands in full light.
The captain's raised hand
The captain is Frans Banninck Cocq, and he is the one giving the order. His hand reaches out toward the viewer, and that single gesture does more work in the picture than it first seems to…
What You'll Discover
Who the girl in gold is.
Why a dead chicken hangs at her waist.
What lies under the paint.
What Rembrandt changed while he painted.
Why a daylight scene is called The Night Watch.