Time to revisit Rembrandt's The Night Watch, a glowing symbol of democracy | Jonathan Jones

Better lit than ever before, commanding a beautiful expansive hall, this national treasure holds the stage before a swarming, admiring crowd for whom — in a Dutch spring that has drawn eyes to the commonsense scale and attitudes of this polity where a monarch rationally retires to make way for the future — The Night Watch is plainly a symbol of Dutch nationhood. A patchwork parliament of varied individuals congregate in Rembrandt's democratic painting. The Night Watch was painted in the 17th century as a group portrait of a militia company led by one Frans Banning Cocq.

Companies of urban militia were part of the everyday life of the Dutch Republic, as it asserted its independence from the Spanish empire.

The Night Watch

Yet Rembrandt's masterpiece is nothing like a conventional patriotic painting. It simultaneously transcends and mocks its context.


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Instead of a distinguished company of worthy officers and well-trained men Rembrandt shows a baroque profusion of gestures and expressions, a raggle taggle crowd of comic types from an old soldier hunched over his gun to the preening figures of the militia captain and his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch. He also adds enigmatic details — why is there a little girl among the soldiers and why does light fall on her in such a moving golden glow?

No two faces point the same way: Instead of discipline, Rembrandt suggests something close to chaos. So why is The Night Watch so stirring? Why is it considered a national symbol when it seems to mock the Dutch as part-time soldiers and foolish burghers? The comedy of this immense pairing is counterposed with tragedy. It is, truly, a watch through the night. The human, all too human company stand together against encroaching shadows.

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A soft, enfolding fog of night surrounds them. The light that illuminates them is a flash in the dark. They are all the more heroic for being so vulnerable, flawed and eccentric.

Onze helden zijn terug!

Upon seeing the refreshed work, journalists promptly re-christened it the "Day Watch. Rembrandt, possibly more than any other artist, has suffered from the ministrations of picture restorers. The infamous "Rembrandt brown" is their work, not his, and so too is the widespread impression that he was a monotonous colorist who invariably worked with a low-keyed palette.

It is true that the forceful use of chiaroscuro in his paintings, with its emphasis on the mysterious, evocative qualities of shadow, has always disturbed certain critics, and so occasionally has his subject matter. John Ruskin, the 19th Century English art critic and essayist, who had a superb knack for being wrong in just the right words, remarked that "it is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight, but of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see by rushlight. In the past generation not only the Night Watch but many other Rembrandt paintings have been stripped of their dirty and discolored overlays-with a consequential appraisal by critics of his genius as a colorist.

There is an understandable, if not a good, reason why Rembrandt's works were so slathered with varnish. As he matured he became increasingly free in his technique, using bold strokes, passages of broken color, heavy impasto applied with the palette knife, and areas scumbled with his fingers. This highly personal stlye proved a mystery to most critics of the late 17th and 18th Centuries, who attributed it to laxness or perversity.

Rembrandt himself seems to have suggested indirectly that his work was to be observed at a slight distance, so that the intervening space would make his strokes and colors fuse. According to Houbraken, "visitors to his studio who wanted to look at his works closely were frightened away by his saying, 'The smell of the colors will bother you. To their credit, it should be recorded 'that there were a few early critics who admired Rembrandt's rough strokes and said so. The Work you' d think was huddled up in haste, But mark how truly ev'ry Colour's placed, With such Oeconomy in such a sort, That they each mutualiy support.

The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn

One or two theorists of Rembrandt's era agreed that his paintings, in their "coarse rugged Way," would appear more coherent if one stepped back from them, but they noted that a similar coherence could be obtained with varnish. As a result, for more than a century after Rembrandt's death liberal applications of varnish, frequently tinted, were applied to many of his paintings by dealers-and what is even more unfortunate-by collectors.

Theoretically, the Night Watch should not have been a candidate for such treatment. Although it contains some wonderfully rich and complex areas, Rembrandt did not paint it in the freest style he would ultimately achieve. Nonetheless, this masterpiece received its full gallonage of Golden Glow and Toner.

In fairness to the varnishers, it must be said that their intention was to protect the paintings from dirt as well as to "improve" certain of them by making the strokes and colors blend. Inadvertently, the varnishers also rendered a great service to the world of art.

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In , when the Night Watch was still covered with a thick layer of hardened varnish, an unemployed ship's cook went at it with a knife. He seems to have had no reason for this act of apparent madness beyond the fact that the painting was famous and he was not. But its surface coating proved as resistant as glass, and the attacker was unable to cut through it.

The Night Watch was commissioned by Captain Barining Cocq and 17 members of his civic guards; that this was the total of Rembrandt's clients for the work is assumed from the fact that 18 names, added by an unknown hand after the painting was completed, appear on a shield on the background wall. Doubtless the guardsmen expected a group portrait in which each member would be clearly recognizable, although perhaps not of equal prominence; it was often the practice for less affluent or junior members of a group to be represented only by heads or partial figures, for which they paid less than did those who were portrayed full length.

The guardsmen, most of whom must have been familiar with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp of a decade earlier, may also have foreseen that the artist would not produce a standard, static painting. But none of them could have been prepared for the thunderous masterwork with which they were confronted. The Night Watch is colossal. In its original dimensions it measured approximately 13 by 16 feet and contained not only the 18 guardsmen but 16 other figures added by Rembrandt to give still more animation to an already tumultuous scene.