The Night Watch: A Painting by Rembrandt van Rijn
The artist’s largest surviving painting
Born in 1606, the son of a miller from Leiden in the Netherlands, Rembrandt was the greatest of all Dutch painters, living in a golden age for Dutch art.
His life was clouded by misfortune — he lost his wife, mistress and five of his six children, and was declared financially insolvent when he was 50. However, throughout all his troubles he continued to paint prolifically — originally mainly in portraiture but later branching out into virtually every subject, producing masterpieces at all stages of his career. He died in 1669 at the age of 63.
Painted in 1642, The Night Watch is Rembrandt’s largest surviving painting and without doubt his most famous and most discussed work, having had several books and countless articles devoted to it. It has been subjected to much learned (and sometimes fanciful) interpretation, and it has been proposed, for example, that it represents an allegory of the triumph of Amsterdam, inspired by a drama by the great Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel, a contemporary of Rembrandt.
The grandeur of the portrayal might seem to invite such high-flown interpretations, but they run contrary to Rembrandt’s whole approach to art, and it is more sensible to see the painting as part of the Dutch…
