🎨 La ronde "de jour" de Rembrandt | Night Watch | Rijksmuseum | Analyse | Art

In 1640, Frans Banning Cocq, captain of Amsterdam's civic guard, and his 17 officers commissioned a portrait from Rembrandt to decorate the banquet hall of their barracks.

Each soldier paid up to 100 florins, a considerable sum, to be immortalized by the renowned painter.

• The civic guard had become merely a ceremonial guard • Warfare was now being waged on the water • Amsterdam had become a safe city where crime was rare

The painting was well-received and hung above the grand fireplace in the banquet hall for several years.

• Years of soot and smoke had accumulated • Varnish oxidation had damaged the work • Color deterioration had worsened

These forms of damage gradually transformed the scene originally captured in daylight into a nighttime scene.

Rembrandt named this work "The Company in Scene," never "The Night Watch."

The accumulation of dirt and varnish oxidation created the illusion of a nighttime scene, giving rise to the incorrect nickname "The Night Watch" that persists to this day.