Oil on canvas, 363 × 437 cm, painted by Rembrandt in 1642. The real title is a
good deal less suggestive: Militia Company of District II under the Command of
Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It is kept at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which
calls it the most important painting in its collection.
There is no watch and there is no night. The scene happens in broad daylight,
but the canvas darkened under layers of varnish and by the 19th century everyone
was calling it that. It was a group portrait paid for by the militiamen
themselves, each according to the place he got in the composition, and the usual
solution to the genre was a row of faces, like a school photograph. Rembrandt
did the opposite and set the whole company moving, out of the picture and
towards whoever is standing in front of it.
