Start with the two things everyone knows about The Night Watch: that it is a night scene, and that it is called The Night Watch. Both are wrong. Rembrandt's enormous 1642 canvas is properly the Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq — a group portrait of an Amsterdam civic guard company striding out in daylight. The nickname arrived only in the late eighteenth century, by which time layers of darkened varnish had dimmed the scene so thoroughly that viewers assumed midnight. Cleaning in the 1940s let the daylight back in, but the wrong name had stuck forever. For a painting, being misunderstood turned out to be the least of its problems: few masterpieces have survived so much deliberate violence. Rembrandt finished it in 1642, the year his wife Saskia died, at the height of his fame; today it dominates the Gallery of Honour at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, a canvas roughly 3.8 by 4.5 metres even in its reduced state.
The first assault was bureaucratic. In 1715 the canvas was moved from the militia headquarters to Amsterdam's Town Hall, and because it did not fit the intended spot between two doors, it was simply trimmed — on all four sides, most drastically a strip from the left, deleting two figures and a chunk of bridge railing entirely. We know exactly what was lost because a small contemporary copy, attributed to Gerrit Lundens, survives and shows the full composition. Nobody thought to keep the off-cuts. Eighteenth-century civic pragmatism did more permanent damage than any of the attackers who came later.
Knives and acid
The attackers came anyway. In 1911 an unemployed ship's cook slashed at the painting with a knife, but the blade failed to get through the thick varnish. The painting was not so lucky on 14 September 1975, when William de Rijk, an unemployed schoolteacher who later said he was acting on a divine mission, cut a dozen zigzag slashes into the canvas with a serrated bread knife, gouging strips from Captain Banninck Cocq and his lieutenant before guards reached him. Restorers worked for months; faint traces of the cuts remain visible up close, deliberate scars in the paint's history. Then in April 1990 a man sprayed concentrated acid onto the canvas from a hidden bottle. Warders doused the surface with water within seconds, and the acid never penetrated beyond the varnish layer — vindication, at last, for the transparent shield that had defeated the 1911 knife.
War added a stranger chapter. When the Netherlands mobilised in 1939, the canvas was taken off its stretcher, and it spent much of the German occupation rolled around a cylinder, moved between hiding places before ending up in a climate-controlled chamber deep in the limestone caves of Mount Saint Peter near Maastricht. It came home in 1945, was unrolled, relined and rehung — a five-metre painting that had spent the war as a scroll.
Operation Night Watch
Since 2019 the Rijksmuseum has run Operation Night Watch, the largest research and conservation project in the painting's history, conducted inside a glass chamber in the gallery so that visitors can watch the scanning and treatment live. The project has mapped the canvas down to individual pigment particles, found a hidden preparatory sketch beneath the paint, and identified a rare lead-containing layer Rembrandt seems to have used to protect the canvas from damp. In 2021 the museum used artificial intelligence, trained on the Lundens copy, to reconstruct and print the trimmed edges, temporarily displaying the painting at its original size for the first time in three centuries — the two lost figures on the left restored as ghostly computed neighbours. One more myth deserves its correction: the story that the painting was ridiculed on delivery and destroyed Rembrandt's career. The record shows the militiamen paid, contemporaries praised it, and Rembrandt's later financial collapse had other, more human causes — an expensive house and an art collection bought at the top of the market. The Night Watch has been renamed by grime, shortened by carpenters, stabbed, sprayed and rolled up in a cave, and it is still the painting the Netherlands builds rooms around. Rembrandt gave the militia movement and thunder; history supplied the plot.
Quiz nuggets
- The Night Watch's real title is Militia Company of District II under Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (1642) — and it depicts daytime, darkened by old varnish.
- The canvas was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 to fit Amsterdam's Town Hall; the lost portions are known from a copy attributed to Gerrit Lundens.
- In 1975 William de Rijk slashed it a dozen times with a bread knife; in 1990 it was sprayed with acid, which only harmed the varnish.
- During the Second World War it was hidden rolled around a cylinder, ending up in the Maastricht caves.
- In 2021 the Rijksmuseum used AI trained on the Lundens copy to reconstruct the trimmed edges during Operation Night Watch.