Night Watch by Rembrandt

Another one of a Rembrandt’s more famous group portraits is Night Watch, commissioned in 1642. This portrait embodies the Baroque style with its drama and animated crowd (Rosenberg 139). Night Watch was commissioned by Captain Banning Cocq and has been hailed as his most famous painting (Wallace 109). It is a masterpiece of the Baroque in both style and massive size. The dimensions of Night Watch are 13 ft. by 16 ft. and within these parameters contains eighteen guardsmen and sixteen other figures, like children, that Rembrandt added. He turned a traditional Dutch portrait into a “dazzling blaze of light, color, and motion, and subordinating the requirements of orthodox portraiture to a far larger, more complex but sill unified whole” (Wallace 109-110). Night Watch is a dramatic moment of the call to arms and Rembrandt greatly depicted this moment of intense chaos (Rosenberg 138). The sound of the drum signifies the call to arms and Rembrandt shows the guardsmen rushing into place and children and dogs running around. Everyone is trying to get into position. Even though this was canvas, he incorporated, through image, the idea of sound and it has been said that the painting is “loud with the sound of the drum and musket, the thud of the ramrods, the barking of dogs, the cries of children”.

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