Rembrandt's Night Watch isn't set at night.
Rembrandt's most famous painting shows a militia company stepping out in daylight. For centuries it hid under a dark varnish so thick that people assumed it was a night scene, and the nickname stuck. That same grimy coating once saved it from a knife attack.
The painting's real title is a mouthful: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Rembrandt finished it in 1642, at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, for the banquet hall of the Amsterdam musketeers' guild. Captain Banninck Cocq and seventeen of his men paid about 100 guilders each, 1,600 in total, a large sum at the time. At roughly 3.6 by 4.4 metres, it is thought to have been painted in a lean-to in Rembrandt's garden because it would not fit in his studio.
What made it famous was how Rembrandt broke the rules of the group portrait. Instead of lining the sitters up in rows, he caught them mid-movement, lit in dramatic pools of light and shadow, with a mysterious glowing girl carrying a dead chicken on her belt, a pun on the company's emblem.
For much of its life the canvas was coated in a darkened varnish, which is why later viewers took it for a nocturnal scene and called it The Night Watch. The varnish was only removed in the 1940s. In 1911 an unemployed shoemaker tried to slash the painting, and the thick varnish protected it. Later attacks, with a bread knife in 1975 and acid in 1990, were repaired by conservators.
The painting has also lost part of itself. In 1715 it was moved to Amsterdam's town hall and trimmed on all four sides, probably to fit between two columns, cutting away two figures on the left. A 17th-century copy by Gerrit Lundens preserves the original composition, and in 2021 the Rijksmuseum used it, with the help of neural networks, to display a temporary reconstruction of the missing strips.
Source: Wikipedia — The Night Watch · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
