The Night Watch

A militia company in motion: the captain in black and orange at the centre, his lieutenant in yellow beside him, and around them a crowd of musketeers and figures in various states of preparation and movement. A small girl in a golden dress near the centre. Drummers at the edge. A dog. Light falls on some figures dramatically while others are lost in shadow. Everything is motion, noise, and urgency caught in a single moment.

The title came later. The painting was not called The Night Watch in Rembrandt's lifetime. It was a group portrait: "The Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq." Centuries of accumulated dark varnish made viewers assume they were looking at a night scene. When the varnish was cleaned in the twentieth century, it was confirmed: the painting is set in daylight. The name stuck anyway.

In 1715, the painting was moved to the Amsterdam Town Hall. It did not fit between two columns. Rather than alter the architecture, workers trimmed the canvas: two feet from the left side, nine inches from the top, smaller amounts from the right and bottom. The composition you have seen in every reproduction is what survived the cut. The original had at least two additional figures on the left, and the spatial balance was different.

The Rijksmuseum's Operation Night Watch used machine learning to reconstruct the missing sections based on a 1653 copy by Gerrit Lundens, who painted the full composition before the trim. In 2021, the reconstruction was displayed alongside the original. Most viewers had never seen the complete painting before.

"What we have called a masterpiece for three hundred years is a cropped fragment. The full painting exists only in a copy."

This was a commission. Seventeen militia members paid for the right to appear in the painting. Rembrandt broke the conventions of the genre: militia portraits were orderly, posed, and gave each member equal prominence. He gave them motion, drama, and unequal lighting. Some members were furious to find themselves in shadow while others were illuminated. Whether this was artistic principle or simple indifference to his patrons has been argued about ever since.

The painting has been attacked three times. A discharged navy cook slashed it with a knife in 1911. A man slashed it again in 1975, making twelve cuts before being stopped. Acid was thrown on it in 1990. Each time it was restored. The current painting is a restoration of a restoration of a cropped version of the original.

• The girl in the golden dress carries a chicken. Near the centre, partly obscured, the small girl in yellow has a dead chicken hanging from her belt by its claws. This is not decorative. The militia company was called the "Kloveniers," from the Dutch word for the arquebus. Their guild emblem was a claw. The chicken's claw is the claw of the Kloveniers. The girl is a living heraldic device, placed in a painting of a militia and carrying their symbol.
• Rembrandt painted himself into it. Between the figures, just behind the lieutenant's shoulder, a face is visible in the crowd: a man looking directly out of the canvas. The face closely resembles Rembrandt's self-portraits. He inserted himself as a witness, exactly as van Eyck had done two centuries earlier in Bruges.
• Operation Night Watch found a hidden chalk sketch. In 2019, scanning revealed a preparatory sketch in the paint layers: an earlier plan with more spears and a slightly different composition. Rembrandt changed his mind during the painting itself. The pentimento in the strict sense -- the correction beneath the surface -- is visible in the scanning data if not with the naked eye.