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The Night Watch

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This article is about the Rembrandt painting. For other uses, see Night Watch.
The Night Watch
Dutch: De Nachtwacht
ArtistRembrandt van Rijn
Year1642 (1642)
MediumOil on canvas
MovementBaroque painting, Dutch Golden Age painting
Dimensions363 cm × 437 cm (142.9 in × 172.0 in)
LocationAmsterdam Museum on permanent loan to Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands
WebsiteAmsterdam Collection online

Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,[1] also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch (Dutch: De Nachtwacht), is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best-known painting in its collection. The Night Watch is one of the most famous Dutch Golden Age paintings. Rembrandt's large painting (363 by 437 centimetres (12 by 14+1⁄2 feet)) is famed for transforming a group portrait of a civic 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 the Dutch Golden Age. It depicts the eponymous company moving out, led by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (dressed in black, with a red sash) 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 the arquebusiers in the figure of the young girl who carries a dead chicken on her belt, referencing the clauweniers (arquebusiers) and a type of drinking horn used at group banquets.[3]

History

Commission

The painting was commissioned around 1639 by Captain Banninck Cocq and seventeen members of his Kloveniers (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 1,600 guilders 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 built Kloveniersdoelen (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 the French queen, Marie de' Medici, in 1638. Even though she was escaping from her exile from France ordered by her son Louis 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 by Gerrit Lundens with lines added indicating the areas cut down from the original painting in 1715

Location and alterations

The Night Watch as it hung in the Trippenhuis in 1885, by August Jernberg

The Night Watch first hung in the Groote Zaal (Great Hall) of Amsterdam's Kloveniersdoelen. 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]

A 17th-century copy of the painting by Gerrit Lundens (1622–1683), on loan from the National Gallery, London, to the Rijkmuseum,[8] shows the original composition.[9]

When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, the Town Hall became the Palace on the Dam and the magistrates moved the painting to the Trippenhuis of the family Trip. Napoleon ordered it returned, but after the occupation ended in 1813, the painting again moved to the Trippenhuis, which now housed the Dutch Academy of Sciences. It remained there until it moved to the new Rijksmuseum when its building was finished in 1885.[citation needed]

The painting was removed from the Rijksmuseum in September 1939, at the onset of World 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 of Maastricht, Netherlands.[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 the Philipsvleugel of the Rijksmuseum. When the refurbishment was finished in April 2013, the painting was returned to its original place in the Nachtwachtzaal (Room of the Night Watch).

In 2021, the painting was exhibited from June to September with the trimmed-off sections recreated using convolutional neural networks, an artificial 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]

Vandalism and restoration

Dutch-language Newsreel of the restoration in 1975
The 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 from mental 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 was livestreamed. 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 making The Night Watch."[19]

New LED illumination

On 26 October 2011, the Rijksmuseum unveiled new, sustainable LED lighting for The 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 a color temperature of 3,200 kelvin, similar to warm-white light sources such as tungsten halogen. It has a color rendering index of over 90, which makes it suitable for the illumination of artifacts such as The 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]

Gigapixel photograph

On 13 May 2020, the Rijksmuseum published a 44.8 gigapixel image of The Night Watch made from 528 different still photographs.[20] "The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks",[21] 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 the fine detail.

Cultural legacy

  • 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 of Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony and Ayreon's "The Shooting Company of Captain Frans B. Cocq" from Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer. In King Crimson's song "The Night Watch", from the band's 1974 album Starless and Bible Black, lyricist Richard 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 film Rembrandt depicts the painting, shown in error in its truncated form, as a failure at its completion, perceived as lampooning its outraged subjects.
  • In Jean-Luc Godard's 1982 film Passion, The Night Watch is reenacted 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 the eponymous 1995 film, Night Watch, which focuses on the painting's theft.
  • The Night Watch is parodied on the British cover of Terry Pratchett's 2002 book by the same name. The cover illustrator, Paul Kidby, pays tribute to his predecessor Josh Kirby[22][23][24] 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 director Peter Greenaway called Nightwatching, 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 film Rembrandt'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 describes The Night Watch as (currently) the fourth most famous painting in the Western world, after the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
  • In 2006. The Night Watch inspired the literary work A Ronda da Noite[25] by the famous Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa Luís.
  • On The Amazing Race 21, a task in Amsterdam had teams re-create The Night Watch using live actors.[26]
  • The painting appears in episode 3 of season 2 of Netflix's Sense8.[27]
  • The painting appeared in episode 5 of the acclaimed 2016 South Korean television series Goblin as an art collection of the character Goblin / Kim Shin (Gong Yoo).
  • The painting appeared in the 2022 videogame Horizon Forbidden West by Guerrilla Games in the art vault of Tilda van der Meer.

Other representations

The sculptures of The Night Watch in 3D at the Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam in 2006–2009
  • Russian artist Alexander Taratynov created a bronze-cast representation of the famous painting that was displayed in Amsterdam's Rembrandtplein from 2006 to 2009. After displays in other locations, the sculptures returned in 2012 and are now permanently installed in front of Louis Royer's 1852 cast iron statue of Rembrandt.[28]
  • The only full-sized replica in the Western world is displayed by the Canajoharie Library & Art Gallery, in Canajoharie, New York, donated to the library in the early 20th century by the library's founder, Bartlett Arkell.
  • The Rijksmuseum's flashmob 'Our Heroes are Back' recreated The Night Watch in an unsuspecting shopping mall in Breda, Netherlands – published on 1 April 2013 on YouTube.[29]
  • 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 paint The 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 of The 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 artist Matthias Laurenz Gräff, a distant descendant of Banninck Cocq and 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".[30]

See also

References

  1. ^ Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq Archived 2014-11-29 at the Wayback Machine at rijksmuseum.nl. The original Dutch: Schutters van wijk II onder leiding van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq
  2. ^ "The Night Watch, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642". Rijksmuseum. Archived from the original on 2017-07-09. Retrieved 2023-10-12.
  3. ^ Silver, Larry (2021-10-18). Rembrandt's Holland. Reaktion Books. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-78023-879-1.
  4. ^ D. C. Meijer Jr, "De Amsterdamsche Schutters-stukken in en buiten het nieuwe Rijksmuseum" Archived 2016-12-06 at the Wayback Machine, In: Oud Holland 2, no. 4 (1886): 198–121 Translated in English by Tom van der Molen.
  5. ^ "Rembrandt's Night Watch Unravelled: Identity of All the Militiamen Are Finally Revealed". ArtDaily. 14 March 2009. Archived from the original on 2019-05-19. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  6. ^ a b Boffey, Daniel (23 June 2021). "AI helps return Rembrandt's The Night Watch to original size". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 23 June 2021. Retrieved 23 June 2021.
  7. ^ "Cut it Off – From the series Operatie Nachtwacht". Rijksmuseum. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 24 June 2021. Why was the work reduced in size and when did this happen? Find out in this video.
  8. ^ "Kopie naar De Nachtwacht, Gerrit Lundens (toegeschreven aan), ca. 1642 - ca. 1655". Rijksmuseum (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 2023-10-31. Retrieved 2023-10-31.
  9. ^ "The Company of Captain Banning Cocq ('The Nightwatch')". National Gallery. Archived from the original on 2015-01-30. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  10. ^ "De Kluis – national World War II treasure room". Maastricht Underground. Archived from the original on 2019-05-16. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
  11. ^ "Artificial Intelligence – From the series Operatie Nachtwacht". Rijksmuseum. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 24 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.
  12. ^ "Missing Pieces – From the series Operatie Nachtwacht". Rijksmuseum. Archived from the original on 23 June 2021. Retrieved 24 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.
  13. ^ a b Wallace, Robert (1968). The World of Rembrandt: 1606-1669. New York: Time-Life Books. pp. 108–9.
  14. ^ a b "Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch' Slashed". The New York Times. 15 September 1975. p. 41. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
  15. ^ a b "Art attack: Famous works vandalised". BBC News. October 8, 2012. Archived from the original on May 31, 2023. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  16. ^ Puchko (2 June 2015). "16 Things You Might Not Know About Rembrandt's The Night Watch". Mental Floss. Archived from the original on 11 July 2021. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  17. ^ "[?] Who Slashed Rembrandt Painting Reoprted a Suicide". The New York Times. Reuters. 22 April 1976. p. 9. Archived from the original on 27 February 2024. Retrieved 27 February 2024.
  18. ^ "Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' Painting Vandalized". Los Angeles Times. Associated Press. 6 April 1990. Archived from the original on 2012-10-26. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  19. ^ Boffey, Daniel (5 July 2019). "'Like a military operation': restoration of Rembrandt's Night Watch begins". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 16 November 2019. Retrieved 5 July 2019.
  20. ^ "Ultra high resolution photo". Rijksmuseum.nl. Archived from the original on 2022-09-23. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  21. ^ "Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch – From the series Operatie Nachtwacht". Rijksmuseum. Archived from the original on 25 June 2021. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
  22. ^ "Night Watch (Terry Pratchett) Easter Egg - Night Watch Cover". eeggs.com. Archived from the original on 2021-03-03. Retrieved 2021-02-27.
  23. ^ "BBC - h2g2 - Paul Kidby - Discworld Illustrator - A912593". Archived from the original on 2014-09-07.
  24. ^ "Book:Night Watch - Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki". wiki.lspace.org. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-09-07.
  25. ^ "A Ronda da Noite - Livro - WOOK". www.wook.pt. Archived from the original on 2020-09-30. Retrieved 2021-02-27.
  26. ^ Kwiatkowski, Elizabeth (26 November 2012). "'The Amazing Race' eliminates Racers Abbie Ginsberg and Ryan Danz". Reality TV World. Archived from the original on 11 November 2017. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
  27. ^ McHenry, Jackson. "The Sense8 Season-Two Trailer Is an Action-Packed Lecture on Rembrandt". Vulture. Archived from the original on 2017-05-13. Retrieved 2017-05-06.
  28. ^ "About NW3D". Niveau. nightwatch3d.com. Spring 2004. Archived from the original on 2012-02-11. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  29. ^ Onze helden zijn terug!. Rijksmuseum. ING Nederland. 1 April 2013. Archived from the original on 16 August 2021. Retrieved 5 October 2021 – via YouTube.
  30. ^ "www.meinbezirk.at: Matthias Laurenz Gräff, 15 Jahre Diplom-Jubiläum zum Akademischen Maler". 5 April 2023. Archived from the original on 2023-11-08. Retrieved 2023-11-29.

Further reading

  • Bikker, Jonathan (2013). The Night Watch. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. ISBN 978-90-71450-86-0.
  • Müller, Jürgen (2015). Der sokratische Künstler. Studien zu Rembrandts Nachtwache. Leiden: Brill. pp. 226–308. ISBN 978-90-04-28525-5.
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