The Night That Never Was: Rembrandt's Living Militia
A painting so dark it was named for a night that never happened — and so vast it had to be painted in a garden shed. This is the story of a masterpiece that survived knives, wartime hiding, and centuries of misunderstanding.
Step into the Rijksmuseum today and you are met by a wall of motion: men striding forward out of shadow, a captain's hand caught mid-gesture, a hired drummer among the crowd, a small girl glowing with impossible light amid the chaos. This is The Night Watch, completed by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1642, and for centuries people believed they were looking at a nocturnal scene. They were wrong. The darkness was not painted by Rembrandt at all — it was varnish, accumulated over generations, that turned a bright daytime muster into what looked like midnight.
The painting's real title is far less poetic: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Cocq, dressed in black with a red sash, commissioned the work around 1639 along with seventeen fellow members of his civic guard company, the kloveniers. Each man paid roughly one hundred guilders to appear in the painting, and their names were later inscribed on a shield added around 1715. In total, thirty-four figures crowd the canvas — far more than the eighteen who paid, since Rembrandt folded in extra characters, including a hired drummer added at no charge, plus a mysterious young girl carrying a dead chicken, an emblem referencing the militia's arquebusier tradition.
Rembrandt was paid 1,600 guilders for the commission, an enormous sum for the era, and it was one of seven similar group portraits ordered from different painters at the time. Some historians connect this flurry of commissions to the arrival of the French queen, Marie de' Medici, in Amsterdam in 1638. She came in exile, forced out by her son Louis XIII, yet the Dutch capital greeted her with lavish ceremony — and Rembrandt's canvas, among others, may have been part of the display of civic pride surrounding her visit.
The painting's scale was staggering for its time: 363 by 437 centimetres, so large that it reportedly could not fit inside Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio. It is thought he completed it in a lean-to in his garden instead, though this remains a matter of inference rather than certainty. The result transformed the standard militia group portrait — usually a static lineup of stiff faces — into a theatrical burst of movement, powered by his mastery of light and shadow, a technique later called tenebrism.
The canvas commissioned to hang in the banquet hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, Amsterdam's militia headquarters, has moved many times since. In 1715 it was relocated to the Amsterdam Town Hall, where it was trimmed on all four sides, presumably to fit between two columns — a common but destructive practice of the era. The cuts erased two figures from the left edge, along with the top of the arch, the balustrade, and the edge of the step, and those missing fragments have never been recovered. Fortunately, a 17th-century copy by Gerrit Lundens preserves the original composition, now on loan to the Rijksmuseum from London's National Gallery.
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