The Night Watch is famous because Rembrandt took a job that usually produced rows of stiff portraits, a militia company, and painted the company on the move: a captain giving the order to march, muskets loaded and fired, a drummer, a barking dog, and light that picks out some faces and leaves others in shadow. It is probably the most famous painting in the Netherlands.
Portraits of Amsterdam's civic guards normally lined the men up under an even light, and each man paid for his place. Rembrandt finished this one in 1642 for the banquet hall of the new Kloveniersdoelen, the guardsmen's headquarters, and gave the company something to do.
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The picture on the wall of the Rijksmuseum, though, is not the picture the company paid for. It was painted for the banquet hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, and in 1715 it was moved to the Amsterdam Town Hall, where the space waiting for it was too small.
So the canvas was cut down on all four sides. Strips of painted canvas came off every edge, and some of them had people on them.
I find it strange that a composition praised for centuries was finished, in the end, by the size of a wall.
What You'll Discover
What the captain's hand is doing.
Who the girl in gold is.
What the title gets wrong.
What was cut off in 1715.
Who came at it with a knife.
What lies under the paint.