Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age

In 1642 Rembrandt van Rijn finished The Night Watch, a huge group portrait of an Amsterdam civic militia company led by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. At about 3.8 by 4.5 meters, it shows the men not lined up stiffly but spilling into motion, with a drum, a banner and a gun going off, and a bright shaft of light picking out the central figures. It hangs today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The name comes from darkened varnish that once made the scene look like night; cleaning showed that it takes place by daylight.³¹

The painting belongs to the world of the Dutch Republic, which had broken away from Spanish rule in the long Eighty Years' War and was now the richest trading country in Europe, helped by the Dutch East India Company. Calvinist churches had stripped their walls of images, so there was little religious commissioning. Painters instead sold to merchants, guilds and townspeople through dealers and markets, and specialized in portraits, landscapes, still lifes and scenes of daily life. Oil painting, perfected in the earlier Netherlands by Jan van Eyck, and Caravaggio's lighting, which Dutch artists had absorbed, gave them the tools.

Rembrandt, born in Leiden in 1606 and working in Amsterdam from the early 1630s, rose to fame with group portraits such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632). He was a master of light and human expression, and he painted, drew and etched many self-portraits across his life. His wife Saskia died in 1642, and he later fell into debt and was declared insolvent in 1656, selling his house and art collection. He died in 1669. Contemporaries such as Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer shaped a Golden Age in which art became a mass market commodity, not a luxury of church and court.²