What X-Ray Technology Found Hidden In The Night Watch After 400 Years

[00:00:00]Some paintings are remembered for the stories they hide. And some are remembered for a name that was never correct, a name given by mistake that stuck for two centuries that defined how the world understood one of the greatest paintings ever made, and that turned out to describe something that was never there. The painting you are looking at right now was completed in 1642, and its real name is The Militia Company of District II under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Nobody calls it that. Everyone calls it The Night Watch, a name it received because layers of darkened varnish and accumulated dirt made the canvas appear so dark that scholars assumed it depicted a nocturnal scene. When conservators finally cleaned the painting in the 1940s, they discovered it is a daytime scene.

[00:00:47]The darkness that gave it its name was never in the painting. It was on top of it. Two men stride through the composition, a captain in black with a red sash giving an order, his lieutenant in yellow catching the light beside him, and masses of figures in various states of preparation. Everywhere there is motion and noise, and somewhere in the background, barely visible between two figures, a single eye looks directly out of the painting at whoever is standing in front of it. That eye belongs to Rembrandt. He hid himself in his own painting. And when the painting was moved to a new location in 1715, the edges were cut off to make it fit permanently, removing parts of the composition that have never been recovered, changing what everyone since has seen without anyone knowing exactly what had been taken away. Look at the background of the painting. Between the figure of a man in green and a guard wearing a metal helmet slightly to his right. In the gap between those two figures, partially obscured and almost entirely lost in shadow, there is a face. Only one eye and the brim of a beret are clearly visible, but the eye is looking directly out of the canvas, not at the action in the foreground, not at the captain giving his order, but outward through the surface of the painting at the viewer standing in front of it. Rembrandt painted himself into his own composition. He did this in other major works throughout his career, always in a marginal position, always looking out rather than participating.

[00:02:18]The self-portraits he made throughout his life record the face of a man who studied himself with more sustained attention than almost any other artist in history. The eye in The Night Watch is that same face, younger, glimpsed between two figures doing something more obviously important, watching the whole thing with the expression of someone simultaneously inside the scene and outside it. He was paid to paint 18 members of a civic guard company.

[00:02:45]He painted them, and then he painted himself watching them, positioned so that finding him requires the viewer to look past everything that was commissioned and paid for into the shadows at the back, where the painter is standing and has always been standing. But, the self-portrait is not the detail that changes everything about this painting.

[00:03:05]That detail is in what is no longer there.

[00:03:08]Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606, the son of a miller, and became by his late 20s the most sought-after portrait painter in Amsterdam, a city that in the 1630s was the wealthiest and most commercially dynamic in the world, whose merchant class had both the money and the appetite to commission the most ambitious art available. His use of light and shadow was not simply a visual technique, but a psychological instrument. He used the emergence of a face from darkness, the specific quality of light on aged skin, the shadow falling across the corner of an eye to communicate inner states that most portraiture of the era did not attempt.

[00:03:50]His subjects look as if they are thinking. He was commissioned to paint The Night Watch around 1639 by Captain Frans Banning Cocq and the members of his civic guard company, a volunteer militia that by 1642 had become primarily a social institution, a mark of civic status, a reason for men of standing to commission paintings of themselves. The standard format was static and formal men arranged in rows, each one clearly identifiable as an individual who had paid to be included. Rembrandt did not produce the standard format. He painted the company in motion figures at different depths, some clearly lit, some in shadow. The captain's hand extended in a gesture of command that creates a dynamic tension running through the entire composition.

[00:04:40]No critic during his lifetime wrote a word against it. The captain had a watercolor copy made for his personal album.

[00:04:47]The myth that the painting ruined Rembrandt's career has been comprehensively demolished by scholars, but it persists because the story of a misunderstood genius is more satisfying than the story of a painter who made something great and had it immediately recognized as great.

[00:05:04]If you want more art deep dives like this one, please like and subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. In 1715, 73 years after the painting was completed, it was moved from the civic guard headquarters to the Amsterdam Town Hall. The room it was being moved into had two doors with a fixed distance between them.

[00:05:29]The painting was too wide to fit.

[00:05:31]The decision was made to cut it down.

[00:05:33]Strips were removed from all four sides, a wide strip from the left, smaller strips from the top, the right, and the bottom. The strips of canvas were not preserved. They were discarded, and what they contained has been lost permanently. A copy made by a painter named Gerrit Lundens while the painting was still intact shows what was there.

[00:05:54]On the left, two additional figures stood before the captain and his lieutenant.

[00:05:59]At the top, an arch was visible above the composition.

[00:06:03]The painting that everyone has seen since 1715 is not the painting Rembrandt completed in 1642.

[00:06:11]It is a version of it cropped on all four sides for the most mundane possible reason, it would not fit through a door.

[00:06:18]Operation Night Watch, the largest conservation and research project ever undertaken on this painting, began in 2019. Among its findings, researchers used the Lundens copy and artificial intelligence to reconstruct what the missing edges likely contained, producing a digital visualization of the painting as Rembrandt completed it.

[00:06:41]The reconstruction was displayed alongside the original in the Rijksmuseum in 2021, the first time since 1715 that anyone had seen the full composition, even in reproduction. The Night Watch has been attacked three times, and each attack tells a different story about what happens when an object achieves the combination of fame and accessibility that makes it both a cultural monument and a target.

[00:07:08]In 1911, an unemployed former ship's cook entered the Rijksmuseum with a shoemaking knife and went at the surface of the painting.

[00:07:17]The thick layer of hardened varnish proved as resistant as glass. The knife scratched the surface without penetrating it. The attack prompted conservatives to remove and reapply the varnish, which led directly to the discovery that the painting was a daytime scene. The man who attacked it accidentally triggered the restoration that gave the world back the painting's actual colors. In 1975, a teacher slashed the canvas with a bread knife, making a dozen zigzag cuts across the lower portion before he was restrained. He was later determined to have been suffering from psychiatric illness.

[00:07:53]The restoration took years. In 1990, an escaped psychiatric patient sprayed the lower section with acid before security could stop him.

[00:08:03]Staff quickly doused the affected area with water, limiting the damage. The painting now has its own escape hatch built into the gallery floor in case of fire. It has survived three direct attacks, two world wars during which it was hidden in multiple locations, and the decision made in 1715 to trim it to fit through a door. The Night Watch has been in the Rijksmuseum since the museum opened in 1885, hanging in its own gallery designed around its scale. It measures roughly 3 and 1/2 by 4 and 1/2 m. Standing in front of it, the figures are larger than life. Operation Night Watch continues to produce discoveries.

[00:08:44]X-ray fluorescence mapping revealed previously unknown lead layers in the preparation. Hyperspectral imaging identified Rembrandt's original color choices in areas where pigments have shifted over centuries. It is the most comprehensive scientific study ever undertaken on a single painting. Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you want more videos like this one, please subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. See you in the next video.