Art: Night Watch

The big burghers, with their starched ruffs, plump cheeks and fierce little beards, annoyed Rembrandt. They paid through the nose for his fine likenesses. Rembrandt had other ambitions than painting portraits: he was obsessed with a desire to portray light. When a Captain Banning Cocq went to him with a 1,600-florin (about $650) group portrait commission, Rembrandt pocketed the fee, and set about painting light, not likenesses.

Cocq captained a company of 17 merchants who were amateur warriors on the side. What they wanted was to see themselves in uniform hanging over the clubhouse mantel. What they got was a huge canvas crowded with unnecessary children, reservists and dogs and occasionally glimpses of themselves rushing about with pikes and muskets in a theatrical storm of light. The light, blooming and whirling among the shadows, made them appear incidental—as they were.

Although nobody liked The Sortie of the Banning Cocq Company, it had, after all, been paid for; so the Cocq Company hung it, trusted the smoky fireplace and their mellow meerschaums to tone it down in time. Amsterdamers later moved it to the City Hall, cut three feet off its sides to make it fit its new home better.

Three hundred years did the rest. Daylight turned to yellow torchlight or faded out altogether. Some of Captain Cocq’s men vanished into the night. Visitors to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum praised the painting to the skies for its golden glow, its mysterious, impenetrable shadows. Reportedly it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who dubbed it “Night Watch,” and the name stuck.

Last week Rembrandt’s original subject was beginning to shine through again. The Rijksmuseum’s restorers had been hard at work for nine months, washing away the grime and varnish, layer by layer, freeing the cool blues, greens and purples, the long-hidden faces. It would take another three months to bring full dawn.