Name: Why This Is Rembrandt's Masterpiece
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T17:01:44.000Z
Duration: 8 min 6 s
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Basic passive voice

Rembrandt's painting the Night Watch, perhaps the most famous work of his long career and of the Dutch golden age, generally, is not set at night.

Adverbs of degree

It's a painting of the militia company of District 2 under the command of Captain Franz Bannock Koch, which is also its true, long original name.

A century later, after years of varnish and low light darkened the canvas, someone called it the Night Watch.

And it stuck because, well, that's what it looked like.

In fact, the Night Watch was meant to be a daytime scene, just like other portraits of the Dutch civic guards, groups of well to do Amsterdam citizens tasked with keeping the peace should threats come to the city walls.

Over the 16th and 17th centuries, Civic Guard portraits became a genre all its own.

And as painting in the Netherlands moved away from spiritual subject matter and toward the secular, artists welcomed commission work from these wealthy guilds because they wanted large group portraits again and again and again.

But if you want to know why Rembrandts is the only civic guard painting that makes it into most school curriculums, all you have to do is look at it.

Commissioned to do what all the others had done, show off the paying members of the guild, Rembrandt takes the genre and explodes his vision through it.

The Night Watch is an eruption of action, shadow and light with drama that's more suited to a biblical or historical epic, not 17 guys from peacetime Amsterdam.

Well, what hits me right away is the balance that Rembrandt strikes between chaos and unity.

He clearly wanted to create a canvas with a lot of movement, but

the challenge was how to make that movement.

People lurching in different directions, performing a variety of actions cohere into a unified whole.

The keystone, the part of the painting that holds everything in place, are the dual figures of the captain and his lieutenant.

The rest of the portrait moves away from them diagonally.

Indeed, Rembrandt places these lines directly onto the painting in the form of weapons and poles.

And the effect isn't just two dimensional.

Maybe the most striking thing is the captain and the lieutenant seem to be emerging from the picture plane, the captain's hand ordering the company forward.

It's as if you could grab it and pull him out of the frame.

The lieutenant's partisan, the spear like weapon he's holding in his left hand, is so expertly foreshortened, it feels like it could cut you.

In fact, based on the angle and the placement of the weapon's Shadow on the ground.

The partisan is beyond the picture plane, or at least it should be.

Another trick Rembrandt uses to achieve this effect is one that will be familiar to filmmakers.

The figures in the front are painted with detail and clarity, while the further back you go in the composition, the softer and hazier things seem to get.

Rembrandt is mimicking depth of field, an optical phenomenon that can make objects in focus pop from their backgrounds.

All of these effects were carefully planned by Rembrandt to anchor the composition around the central figures.

The longer you look at the night watch, the more meaning emerges from this burst of frenetic energy.

For example, the three men with guns are performing the three main actions associated with the arquebus, the primary weapon of this particular guild.

In fact, these poses match almost perfectly engravings from a book called Exercise of Arms, a famous manual on how to use weaponry released at the beginning of that century.

This particular civic guard, the Cloveneers, is signaled again in the chicken that's hanging from the young girl's waist.

A similar claw was on the Cloveniers coat of arms.

And while the captain's hand points toward the viewer, its shadow points towards toward his company's function, its cradling the emblem of Amsterdam, a lion and three crosses.

The Cloveneers were supposed to protect the city.

The other notable feature is Rembrandt's famous use of chiaroscuro, an effect of deeply contrasted light and shadow.

It's a technique that first came to prominence in the work of Caravaggio, who used sharp contrasts and harsh lighting to create intense drama in his paintings.

Rembrandt was clearly interested in this technique, but for him, light served a somewhat different purpose.

Not only is Rembrandt's chiaroscuro softer than Caravaggio's, but

the light in his painting seems to have a numinous quality, as if once it touches the subjects, it becomes a part of them.

If we turn back to the night watch, we can see that Rembrandt uses chiaroscuro to single out two key the lieutenant and the girl.

As we've already seen, both these figures figures contain symbols that call back to the group itself.

In the case of the lieutenant, it's as if the captain's orders to assemble are illuminating his second in command, and

from his light, the rest of the company is to fall in line.

And yet, compositionally, the two lighted figures almost serve the opposite purpose.

Instead of unifying the company, the girl and the lieutenant seem strategically Placed to break up the individual men in the canvas.

Flanking the captain, they almost isolate him.

And thanks to their contrast, we're drawn to the haphazard actions and faces of each man, all seeming to be lost in their own world.

The Night Watch is capturing the moments before the company sets out to its collective purpose.

But the painting almost makes us doubt that they'll ever get there.

Indeed, by the time this painting was made in 1642, nearing the victorious end of the 80s years, war with the Spanish, the Dutch were prosperous and civic guards were more ceremonial than necessary.

At a certain point, these companies became clubs for men to play with their weapons and chip in for fancy group portraits.

It's not inconceivable that Rembrandt may have been secretly making fun of them a little bit in this, his most famous painting.

But that's the tension that the painter captures in the Night Watch.

An endless jockeying between la light and dark, nation and individual chaos and order.

Rembrandt could never let either one of those elemental forces win out in his composition, because if he did, he'd lose the most essential thing, the thing he was striving for, and

achieves with an effect that makes this one of the greatest paintings of all time.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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