This article is about the Rembrandt painting. For other uses, seeNight Watch.
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Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,[1] also known asThe Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to asThe Night Watch (Dutch:De Nachtwacht), is a 1642 painting byRembrandt van Rijn. It is in the collection of theAmsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in theRijksmuseum as the best-known painting in its collection.The Night Watch is one of the most famousDutch Golden Age paintings. Rembrandt's large painting (363 by 437 centimetres (12 by14+1⁄2 feet)) is famed for transforming agroup portrait of acivic guard company into a compelling drama energized by light and shadow (tenebrism). The title is a misnomer; the painting does not depict a nocturnal scene.[2]
The Night Watch was completed in 1642 at the peak of theDutch Golden Age. It depicts the eponymouscompany moving out, led by CaptainFrans Banninck Cocq (dressed in black, with a redsash) and his lieutenant,Willem van Ruytenburch (dressed in yellow, with a white sash). Behind them, the company's colors are carried by the ensign, Jan Visscher Cornelissen. Rembrandt incorporated the traditional emblem of thearquebusiers in the figure of the young girl who carries a dead chicken on her belt, referencing theclauweniers (arquebusiers) and a type of drinking horn used at group banquets.[3]
The painting was commissioned around 1639 by Captain Banninck Cocq and seventeen members of hisKloveniers (civic militia guards).[4] Eighteen names appear on a shield, painted circa 1715, in the center-right background, as the hired drummer was added to the painting for free.[5] A total of 34 characters appear in the painting. Rembrandt was paid 1,600guilders for the painting (each person paid one hundred), a large sum at the time. This was one of a series of seven similar paintings of the militiamen (Dutch:Schuttersstuk) commissioned during that time from various artists.[citation needed]
The painting was commissioned to hang in the banquet hall of the newly builtKloveniersdoelen (Musketeers' Meeting Hall) in Amsterdam. Some have suggested that the occasion for Rembrandt's commission and the series of other commissions given to other artists was the visit of theFrench queen,Marie de' Medici, in 1638. Even though she was escaping from her exile from France ordered by her sonLouis XIII, the queen's arrival was met with great pageantry.[citation needed]
It is thought the painting was completed in a lean-to in Rembrandt's garden as it is too large to fit into his Amsterdam studio.
17th-century copy byGerrit Lundens with lines added indicating the areas cut down from the original painting in 1715
The Night Watch as it hung in the Trippenhuis in 1885, byAugust Jernberg
The Night Watch first hung in theGroote Zaal (Great Hall) of Amsterdam'sKloveniersdoelen. This structure currently houses the Doelen Hotel. In 1715, the painting was moved to the Amsterdam Town Hall, for which it was trimmed on all four sides. This was done, presumably, to fit the painting between two columns and was a common practice before the 19th century. This alteration resulted in the loss of two characters on the left side of the painting, the top of the arch, the balustrade, and the edge of the step. The missing portions have not been found; Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, has some hope that possibly at least the left-hand side might not have been destroyed as it contained three figures, and at the time the painting was trimmed Rembrandt paintings were already expensive.[6][7]
When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, the Town Hall became thePalace on the Dam and the magistrates moved the painting to theTrippenhuis of the family Trip. Napoleon ordered it returned, but after the occupation ended in 1813, the painting again moved to theTrippenhuis, which now housed theDutch Academy of Sciences. It remained there until it moved to the newRijksmuseum when its building was finished in 1885.[citation needed]
The painting was removed from the Rijksmuseum in September 1939, at the onset ofWorld War II. The canvas was detached from its frame and rolled around a cylinder. The rolled painting was stored for four years in a special safe that was built to protect many works of art in the caves ofMaastricht.[10] After the end of the war, the canvas was re-mounted, restored, and returned to the Rijksmuseum.[citation needed]
On 11 December 2003,The Night Watch was moved to a temporary location, due to a major refurbishment of the Rijksmuseum. The painting was detached from its frame, wrapped in stain-free paper, put into a wooden frame which was put into two sleeves, driven on a cart to its new destination, hoisted, and brought into its new home through a special slit.[citation needed]
While the refurbishment took place,The Night Watch could be viewed in its temporary location in thePhilipsvleugel of the Rijksmuseum. When the refurbishment was finished in April 2013, the painting was returned to its original place in theNachtwachtzaal (Room of the Night Watch).
In 2021, the painting was exhibited from June to September with the trimmed-off sections recreated usingconvolutional neural networks, anartificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, based on the copy by Lundens.[11] The recreation corrected for perspective (Lundens must have been sitting on the left side of the painting when he made his copy), and used colors and brush-strokes as used by Rembrandt. The trimming of the painting put the lieutenants in the center, but the original placed them off-center, marching towards an empty space now reinstated, creating a dynamic of the troops marching towards the left of the painting. The cutdown painting by Rembrandt with the AI recreation of the missing portions attached was placed on exhibition for three months. The augmented painting will not be on permanent display so as not to "trick" viewers into thinking they were seeing the full original; the augmentations are a scientific, rather than an artist's, interpretation.[6][12]
Dutch-languageNewsreel of therestoration in 1975The painting during restoration measures (Operation Night Watch), October 2019
For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish, which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name by which it is now commonly known.[13] On 13 January 1911, a jobless shoemaker and former Navy chef attempted to slash the painting with a shoemaker's knife protesting his inability to find work.[14][15] However, the thick coating of varnish protected the painting from any damage at that time.[13] The varnish was removed only in the 1940s.[16]
On 14 September 1975, the work was attacked with a bread knife by an unemployed school teacher, Wilhelmus de Rijk, resulting in several large zig-zagged slashes up to 30 cm long. De Rijk, who suffered frommental illness, claimed he "did it for the Lord" and that he "was ordered to do it".[14] The painting was successfully restored after four years, but some evidence of the damage is still visible up close. De Rijk died by suicide in April 1976, before he could have been charged.[17]
On 6 April 1990, an escaped psychiatric patient sprayed acid onto the painting with a concealed pump bottle.[15] Security guards intervened, stopping the man and quickly spraying water onto the canvas. Ultimately, the acid only penetrated the varnish layer of the painting, and it was fully restored.[18]
In July 2019, a long and complex restoration effort began. The restoration took place in public, in a specially made glass enclosure built and placed in the Rijksmuseum and waslivestreamed. The plan was to move the 337 kg painting into the enclosure starting when the museum closed for the day on 9 July, then to map the painting "layer by layer and pigment by pigment", and plan conservation work according to what was found.Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum's general director, said that despite working there for 17 years, he had never seen the top of the painting; "We know so little on how [Rembrandt] worked on makingThe Night Watch."[19]
WhileThe Night Watch was being restored, museum curatorAnne Lenders noticed that the dog in the painting appeared to be modelled after an illustration byAdriaen van de Venne. Analysis through X-ray demonstrated further similarities between the two dogs.[20]
On 26 October 2011, the Rijksmuseum unveiled new, sustainableLED lighting forThe Night Watch. With new technology, it is the first time LED lighting has been able to render the fine nuances of the painting's complex color palette.[citation needed]
The new illumination uses LED lights with acolor temperature of 3,200 kelvin, similar to warm-white light sources such astungsten halogen. It has acolor rendering index of over 90, which makes it suitable for the illumination of artifacts such asThe Night Watch. Using the new LED lighting, the museum saves 80% on energy and offers the painting a safer environment because of the absence of UV radiation and heat.[citation needed]
On 13 May 2020, the Rijksmuseum published a 44.8 gigapixel image ofThe Night Watch made from 528 different still photographs.[21] "The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks",[22] the museum said. It was primarily created for scientists to view the painting remotely, and to track how ageing affects the painting. The photograph can be viewed online and zoomed into to see fine detail.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to this work in his 1961 essay "Eye and Mind". He writes that "[t]he spatiality of the captain lies at the meeting of two lines of sight that are incompossible with one another. Everyone with eyes has at some time or other witnessed this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been made by it to see a space and the things included therein."[citation needed]
The work has inspired musical works in both the classical and rock traditions, including the second movement ofGustav Mahler's7th Symphony andAyreon's "The Shooting Company of Captain Frans B. Cocq" fromUniversal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer. InKing Crimson's song "The Night Watch", from the band's 1974 albumStarless and Bible Black, lyricistRichard Palmer-James muses on the painting to capture a key period in Dutch history, when, after a long period of "Spanish Wars", the merchants and other members of the bourgeoisie can turn their lives inward and focus on the tangible results of their lives' efforts. The song adopts a number of perspectives, including the primary subjects, the artist himself, and a modern viewer of the painting, and paints a portrait of the emergence of the modern upper-middle class and the consumerist culture.
Alexander Korda's 1936 biographical filmRembrandt depicts the painting, shown in error in its truncated form, as a failure at its completion, perceived as lampooning its outraged subjects.
InJean-Luc Godard's 1982 filmPassion,The Night Watch is re-enacted with live actors in an opening shot. Godard explicitly compares his film to Rembrandt's painting, describing them both as "full of holes and badly-filled spaces". He instructs the viewer not to focus on the overall composition, but to approach his film as one would a Rembrandt and "focus on the faces".
The Night Watch is a major plot device in theeponymous 1995 film,Night Watch, which focuses on the painting's theft.
The Night Watch is parodied on the British cover ofTerry Pratchett's 2002book by the same name. The cover illustrator,Paul Kidby, pays tribute to his predecessorJosh Kirby[23][24][25] by placing him in the picture, in the position where Rembrandt is said to have painted himself. A copy of the original painting appears on the back cover of the book.
The Night Watch is the subject of a 2007 film by directorPeter Greenaway calledNightwatching, in which the film posits a conspiracy within the musketeer regiment of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, and suggests that Rembrandt may have immortalized a conspiracy theory using subtle allegory in his group portrait of the regiment, subverting what was to have been a highly prestigious commission for both painter and subject. His 2008 filmRembrandt's J'Accuse is a sequel or follow-on, and covers the same idea, using extremely detailed analysis of the compositional elements in the painting; in this Greenaway describesThe Night Watch as (currently) the fourth most famous painting in the Western world, after theMona Lisa,The Last Supper and the ceiling of theSistine Chapel.
In 2006.The Night Watch inspired the literary workA Ronda da Noite[26] by the famous Portuguese writerAgustina Bessa Luís.
OnThe Amazing Race 21, a task in Amsterdam had teams re-createThe Night Watch using live actors.[27]
The sculptures ofThe Night Watch in 3D at theRembrandtplein inAmsterdam in 2006–2009
In 2005, Russian sculptor Mikhail Dronov and his Russian-Dutch colleague Alexander Taratynov created a bronze-cast representation of the famous painting, that was displayed in Amsterdam'sRembrandtplein from 2006 to 2009. After displays in other locations, the sculptures returned in 2012, installed in front ofLouis Royer's 1852 cast iron statue of Rembrandt.[29] The statues were removed on February 12, 2020. Rembrandtplein business association was unable to reach an agreement with the artists (Mikhail Dronov and Alexander Taratynov) regarding either the rental or purchase of the Night Watch sculptures.[30]
The only full-sized replica in the Western world is displayed by theCanajoharie Library & Art Gallery, inCanajoharie, New York, donated to the library in the early 20th century by the library's founder, Bartlett Arkell.
The Rijksmuseum'sflashmob 'Our Heroes are Back' recreatedThe Night Watch in an unsuspecting shopping mall inBreda, Netherlands – published on 1 April 2013 onYouTube.[31]
The Night Watch is also replicated in Delft blue at Royal Delft in the Netherlands. This version consists of 480 tiles. Two painters of the manufacture worked simultaneously from the left and right end of the frame, and they met at the center to complete the grand piece. After finishing, both painters recognized that they had a more difficult job as they only used black, to paintThe Night Watch. They used the traditional cobalt oxide color adding water to make the lighter shades. Once it was fired at 1,200 degrees Celsius, the black material turns into blue. It seems that this version ofThe Night Watch, was bought by an unknown buyer and then given to the museum on loan to display to the public.[citation needed]
In 2007, Austrian artistMatthias Laurenz Gräff, a distant descendant of Banninck Cocq and the De Graeff family, used Rembrandt's Night Watch painting of Frans Banninck Cocq in his painting "Ahnenfolge" (Ancestral Succession/Ancestry) as part of his diploma series and thesis "Weltaußenschau-Weltinnenschau".[32]
^"Artificial Intelligence – From the seriesOperatie Nachtwacht".Rijksmuseum.Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved24 June 2021.The missing pieces of the Night Watch have been reconstructed with artificial intelligence. This technology taught a computer to paint like Rembrandt. See how that went in this video.
^"Missing Pieces – From the seriesOperatie Nachtwacht".Rijksmuseum.Archived from the original on 23 June 2021. Retrieved24 June 2021.We've had artificial neural networks reconstructing the original appearance of the painting. Read on to find out about all the biggest differences between the two versions.
