Rembrandt | The Night Watch

About The Night Watch by Rembrandt

Rembrandt finished The Night Watch in 1642, at the height of his reputation. Its real title is far longer — Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq — and it was a group portrait, commissioned and paid for by the eighteen men depicted in it.

What Rembrandt delivered was not what group portraits normally were. Instead of a tidy row of faces, he painted the company at the moment of moving off: the captain stepping forward mid-order, a drummer starting up on the right, muskets being loaded, a dog barking, a boy running through with a powder horn. Figures overlap and some are half-buried in shadow. It is enormous — nearly four metres tall and four and a half wide.

The name is a mistake. Centuries of darkened varnish convinced viewers it was a night scene, and the title stuck; cleaning in the 1940s revealed broad daylight. The canvas was also cut down in 1715 to fit a wall in Amsterdam's town hall — strips were sliced from every side, and roughly sixty centimetres came off the left, taking two figures with them.

Own a hand-painted Night Watch

Rembrandt's light does not come from anywhere. There is no lamp or window in the picture accounting for it; he simply lit the faces and hands he wanted you to notice and let everything else fall into shadow. He built that effect physically — the illuminated passages are loaded on thickly, ridged and standing proud of the surface, while the darks are thin, transparent glazes over the ground. Light in this painting is literally more paint than dark is. A print gives every part of the canvas the same flat film thickness, which is why reproductions of Rembrandt so often look grey and even. Rebuilt by hand in oils, the thick and thin come back, and the figures emerge from the dark the way he arranged them to.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is very large and wide; the composition benefits from as much width as your wall allows.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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