Night Watch

The artist with whom Rembrandt was most preoccupied during the second half of the 1630s was Leonardo da Vinci, and in particular his Last Supper (1495–98), which Rembrandt knew from a reproduction print. It is evident from several of Rembrandt’s sketched variants (1635) on Leonardo’s composition that he was above all intrigued by the problem of the symmetry/asymmetry in the grouping of the figures. The Wedding of Samson (1638) can be seen as Rembrandt’s attempt to surpass Leonardo in the challenge set by this compositional problem and as an effort to accomplish a much livelier scene than Leonardo had achieved in his Last Supper.

In 1640–42 Rembrandt must have been occupied mainly with the large group portrait depicting members of an Amsterdam civic militia company. In a family album belonging to the captain of the company, the work is described as: “the…captain gives order to his lieutenant,…to march out his company of citizens.” This implies that the 34 figures in the painting—actually only 18 militia men out of a company of some 100 men who had decided to have themselves portrayed, plus the 16 extras Rembrandt had added in order to suggest a large group of people—were crowding together just before the company was to assemble for a parade.

In his painting of this scene, which later would acquire the name the Night Watch, Rembrandt revolutionized the formula of the group portrait as part of his continuing effort to achieve the ultimate liveliness in his work. In the words of van Hoogstraten, Rembrandt’s former pupil, “Rembrandt made the portraits that were commissioned subservient to the image as a whole.”

According to van Hoogstraten, Night Watch was conceived by Rembrandt to be a unity (eenwezich). Rembrandt’s intentions in this respect are difficult to appreciate in the painting’s present state, since it has been trimmed on all sides, most of all on the left side. As a result, the figures of the captain and his lieutenant have moved to the centre and into the utmost foreground of the composition. A copy, painted by Gerrit Lundens soon after the Night Watch was finished, shows that the original composition was much more dynamic and coherent than its present state indicates.

The present condition of the painting also reveals the work’s crucial problem, which is at the same time its most intriguing feature. Two intensely lighted figures dominate the composition: the girl in the middle ground and the lieutenant in the foreground. Both are clad in yellow costumes, which strengthens the light effect. Because of this double “spotlight” effect, the tonal values of the painting as a whole seem to be subdued. Consequently, the painting makes a dark impression that no doubt contributed to the epithet “Night Watch.” Van Hoogstraten, who had praised the unity in the Night Watch’s composition, criticized his former master by complaining, “I would have preferred if he [Rembrandt] would have kindled more light into it.” Van Hoogstraten’s remarks were published in his book on the art of painting. His notes on the subordination of the portraits to the conception as a whole, and the lack of light in the painting, have contributed to the myth of Night Watch being rejected and of Rembrandt’s subsequent “fall.”

The myth of Rembrandt’s fall

In the decade following 1642, Rembrandt’s production changed in several ways. His output of paintings diminished drastically, and the few paintings he made varied in subject, size, and style. Moreover, he produced no painted portraits, a fact that can be interpreted in two ways: either he did not receive any portrait commissions during that period or he did not accept such commissions for the decade. At the same time, he embarked on a number of extremely ambitious etchings, such as the portrait (1647) of his friend Jan Six and especially the Hundred Guilder Print, a large (unfinished) print with episodes from chapter 19 of The Gospel According to Matthew.

The sparseness of Rembrandt’s production of painting in the period from 1643 to 1652 is one of the enigmas of his career. Speculations about what happened after he finished the Night Watch have contributed to the development of the “Rembrandt myth,” according to which Rembrandt became largely misunderstood and was ignored after 1642 and, as a consequence, suffered increasing financial difficulty and eventually died in poverty. At the same time, according to this myth, his art deepened. The post-1642 Rembrandt would develop into the “real” Rembrandt, profoundly at one with his inner self and a classic example of a misunderstood genius. As art historian Jan Emmens argued in his book Rembrandt and the Rules of Art, the formation of this myth owes much to a standard biographical model that might be called the “Saul-Paul model”—according to which the subject’s life suddenly undergoes a radical change in direction as the result of a crisis or conversion.

The death of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, and the presumed rejection of the Night Watch by those who commissioned it were long supposed to be the most important events leading to the presumed change in Rembrandt’s life after 1642. But modern art-historical research has questioned the myth of a crisis in 1642, not least because there is simply insufficient evidence that the Night Watch was not accepted. The painting was paid for and remained exhibited in the place for which it was intended. Consequently, it cannot have been rejected. As to the other cause of the presumed turning point in Rembrandt’s life, nothing is known about Rembrandt’s feelings over the deaths of Saskia and three of the children they had together, although these and other aspects of his private life have been amply romanticized in the older Rembrandt literature. One must also take into account the omnipresence of premature death in the 17th century. Death during or after childbirth was a fate that awaited many women, and waves of the plague repeatedly ravaged Europe throughout the century, claiming many victims in Amsterdam.

The “underrated genius” myth arose mainly out of the criticism of Rembrandt’s art that was expressed after his death by some of his largely younger peers. On the face of it, a significant number of 17th-century writings seem to have portrayed Rembrandt in an unfavourable light. He was said to be a heretic in the field of painting and an artist who, with his use of impasto (locally applied thick paint), painted with “dung.”

Such criticisms should be examined in light of the rise of Classicism imported from France, which had brought about a radical change in taste over the course of Rembrandt’s later life. Rembrandt’s drastic and uncompromising realism had no place in the universalizing and idealizing approach of Classicism. For example, von Sandrart, writing in 1675, was judging Rembrandt by the new ideology:

Adhering to the practice [Rembrandt] had adopted, he was prepared to challenge our rules of art, of anatomy, human proportions and perspective, arguing against the use of antique sculptures, against Raphael’s draughtsmanship and the systematic training of young artists, and against the Academies, so vital to our profession, asserting that one should rely only upon nature and observe no other rules.

Yet this criticism of Rembrandt was not an indication that his genius was underrated. On the contrary, as Emmens writes,

The criticism levelled against Rembrandt by the writers of the 1670s makes it clear that he was still the towering figure of an older, and now old-fashioned, generation of Dutch painters. That is why the blows of the classicistic attack, which could have been just as well delivered to any other painter of his generation, all fell on his head.

Negative remarks from Rembrandt’s critics were in fact almost always counterbalanced by the highest praise. The brilliant artist and writer on art Gérard de Lairesse, who met Rembrandt as a young man and was portrayed by him in 1665, confessed in 1707: “I do not want to deny that once I had a special preference for his manner; but at that time I had hardly begun to understand the infallible rules of art.” De Lairesse’s laudatory words that follow explain why Rembrandt was admired:

Everything that art and the brush can achieve was possible for him, and he was the greatest painter of the time and is still unsurpassed. For, they say, was there ever a painter who by means of colour came as close to nature by his beautiful light, lovely harmony, and unique, unusual thoughts [as to the narrative?] and so forth?

But if criticism of Rembrandt’s art became manifest only in the 1670s, how could the sudden decline in Rembrandt’s production of paintings between 1643 and 1652 then be explained? It is not impossible that, after having painted the Night Watch, Rembrandt arrived at the awareness that he may have overstretched the possibilities of the pictorial language he had developed over the previous two decades. It seems as though he had reached an impasse with his spotlight effects. Might it be that in the end Rembrandt’s crisis was an artistic crisis? This possibility seems to be strengthened by his apparent search for ways out of this cul-de-sac.

The great variation in style in his sparse paintings from the decade after 1642 can be seen as an indication that Rembrandt was searching. A scene with the Holy Family (1645) is one of Rembrandt’s most-striking efforts to arrive at a different approach to the function of light in his paintings. Here he introduced three light sources and made abundant use of light reflecting on one surface from another. In this painting he also introduced strong colour, through the glowing red of Mary’s gown. Colour, which up to this point he had increasingly sacrificed to light, now returned—usually a strong red—in the centre of some of his images, such as Jakob’s Blessing (1656) and, later, in the so-called Jewish Bride (see below). Compositions—which were often diagonal in early works by Rembrandt, according to the logic of the concentrated light—were now more frontally constructed.

After creating several highly detailed images, such as The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644) and The Supper at Emmaus (1648), Rembrandt eventually seems to have sought the solution to his artistic “crisis” in a style grafted onto that of the late Titian, a style that was only effective when the painting was seen from a certain distance. Rembrandt’s contribution to this Titianesque manner of painting was a deliberate use of impasto that created a light-reflecting surface in the lighter foreground passages of his paintings. His efforts to develop this new approach to painting started about 1645 and would bloom from the early 1650s onward. That period marks the beginning of what is usually called Rembrandt’s “late style.”