The Night Watch (Dutch: De Nachtwacht) is one of the most famous and important paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn.
It was painted in Amsterdam in 1642, for the civic meeting room at Kloveniersdoelen, the new headquarters of the city’s civic guard, the Kloveniers. It represents the Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq at the time of the meeting.
The original and complete name of the painting is: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.
The main news on the work, in less than five minutes:
The Night Watch – Rembrandt, 1642
In the forties of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was one of the richest cities of Europe. Money of the Dutch East India Company was coming, and the city could not wait to spend it and grow. Everything was built bigger and more beautiful.
In those years the Kloveniersdoelen was built. It was the new headquarters of one of the city’s Guard Corps: the Kloveniers, the arquebusiers.
These Militias were, above all, a kind of confraternities, associations of the bourgeois, with the moral aim, beyond the material aim, to protect the city from enemies. They were the defenders of the fatherland. Joining these militias was a great privilege.
To decorate the huge walls of the main hall of the new headquarters, the companies of arquebusiers commissioned to the greatest painters of the time, a sort of memory pictures, a series of large group paintings that portrayed the officers, those who paid the paintings.
To paint the portrait of the Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, also known as the “Night Watch“, the best artist in the city was called: Renbrandt.
At that time, Rembrandt, was the most desired portraitist of Amsterdam. His way of painting light fascinates everyone.
To realize the huge portrait of the Company, he needed almost two years, between 1640 and 1642. And 100 guilders for each of the heads of the participants.
The main peculiarity of the work of Rembrandt is the apparent confusion.
In the portrait of the Captain Cornelis Bicker Shooting Company, realized by Joachim von Sandrart, for the same occasion, there are 19 dudes that turn their heads in different directions, probably to show their best sides.
But the portrait bu Rembrandt is much more alive, it is definitely more real.
Captain Banning Cocq gathers the company, and everyone hurries to march.
Everybody does his duty: there is someone who begins to wave the flag, who charged the musket, who starts to roll the drum.
The light that comes from the top-left, unifies the scene. It falls with increasing force leading the viewer’s eye to the center, in the triangle of the main characters:
- the enigmatic young girl dressed in yellow, which certainly is not a mustached official and maybe she’s just a symbol: the symbol of victory with her shining dress. She raises the company’s celebratory cup, and brings, attached to her belt, a chicken upside down, the symbol of the defeated enemy and a word and image pan with the name of Captain Cocq.
- the lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, first officer, who stops the view with his flaming uniform and indicates, with the tip of the spear, the opposite direction to guide the view to the third protagonist:
- Captain Frans Banning Cocq, a doctor, who dressed for the occasion the commander clothes: the elegant black dress, the ordnance ruff, the commander scepter, and the red diagonal band, as the symbol of his power. With his outstretched arm the captain ordered to advance. His gesture is focused by the arrival of the light.
The detail is made with a rare three-dimensionality, as it has been done, maybe, just by Antonello da Messina.
The arm coming out of the painting is the key of the composition and Rembrandt made it appling all his skills. The commander heads forward. The order is for himself and his warriors.
The captain Frans Banning Cocq had a great success also in his life, marrying the heiress of a wealthy merchant and becoming a decade later, the Mayor of the city.