The Night Watch is famous because Rembrandt did what the militia portrait rarely allowed. He painted the guardsmen in motion instead of posing: a drum beating, a dog barking, a musket going off. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam calls it the most important painting in the Netherlands.
Group portraits of Amsterdam's civic guards usually lined the men up in rows under even light. In 1642 Rembrandt pushed the captain and his lieutenant to the front and set the whole company moving.
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A march needs daylight, and this one has it. The captain's hand casts a sharp shadow across his lieutenant's coat. Yet the painting carries a name that puts it at midnight.
Nothing else in the scene says night. A company is setting out behind its captain, with a drummer, a banner and a girl in a bright dress, and every shadow falls the way it does in daylight. The mistake was not about one detail. It was about the whole picture.
That name is a mistake, and the question is who made it. I think the mistake says more about us than about Rembrandt: the world fell in love with a painting it could barely see.
Who gave a daytime march the wrong name?
No one signed for it. The name Night Watch first turns up in writing in 1797, more than a century and a half after the canvas was finished, and Britannica says it was given by mistake because of the painting's thick, dark yellow varnish.
To Rembrandt and his clients, it was simply a group portrait of a company. The Rijksmuseum's records place it in the arquebusiers' hall, the Kloveniersdoelen, in 1653, and the museum still gives its full title: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.
The varnish did the rest. Dirt and yellowed resin built up over generations until a daylight march looked like a scene at dusk. It came off only in the 1940s, and by then the nickname was too famous to lose. Among all those guardsmen stands a girl in gold.
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