Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [71]
The Museum Quarter and the Vondelpark | Museumplein | The Rijksmuseum |
Room 12
Dominating Room 12, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht) of 1642 is the most famous of all the artist’s paintings. Restored after being slashed in 1975, the scene is of a militia company, the Kloveniersdoelen, one of the companies formed in the sixteenth century to defend the United Provinces (later the Netherlands) against Spain. As the Habsburg threat receded, so the militias became social clubs for the well heeled, who were eager to commission their own group portraits as signs of their prestige. Rembrandt charged the princely sum of one hundred guilders for each member of the company who wanted to be in the picture; sixteen – out of a possible two hundred – stumped up the cash, including the company’s moneyed captain, Frans Banningh Cocq, whose disapproval of Rembrandt’s live-in relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels (see "Rembrandt’s progress") was ultimately to polish off their friendship. Curiously, The Night Watch is, in fact, a misnomer – the painting got the tag in the eighteenth century when the background darkness was misinterpreted. There were other misconceptions about the painting too, most notably that it was this work that led to the downward shift in Rembrandt’s standing with the Amsterdam elite; in fact, there’s no evidence that the militiamen weren’t pleased with the picture, or that Rembrandt’s commissions dwindled after it was completed.
Though not as subtle as much of the artist’s later work, The Night Watch is an adept piece, full of movement and carefully arranged. Paintings of this kind were collections of individual portraits as much as group pictures, and for the artist their difficulty lay in doing justice to every single face while simultaneously producing a coherent group scene. Abandoning convention in vigorous style, Rembrandt opted to show the company preparing to march off – a snapshot of military activity in which banners are unfurled, muskets primed and drums rolled. There are a couple of allegorical figures as well, most prominently a young, spotlit woman with a bird hanging from her belt, a reference to the Kloveniersdoelen’s traditional emblem of a claw. Militia portraits commonly included cameo portraits of the artist involved, but in this case it seems that Rembrandt didn’t insert his likeness, though some art historians insist that the pudgy-faced figure peering out from the back between the gesticulating militiamen is indeed the artist himself.
Opposite The Night Watch is another Civic Guard portrait, The Meagre Company, started by Frans Hals and finished by Pieter Codde due to a dispute. It’s a great painting, full of sensitively realized, individual portraits, but not only are the wildly differing painting styles of Hals and Rembrandt immediately apparent, but the more conservative arrangement of Hals’s figures forms a striking contrast with Rembrandt’s more fluid, dynamic work.
The Museum Quarter and the Vondelpark | Museumplein |
The Van Gogh Museum
Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) is arguably the most popular, most reproduced and most talked-about of all modern artists, so it’s not surprising that the Van Gogh Museum (daily 10am–6pm, Friday until 10pm; €12.50, children 13–17 years €2.50; audioguide €4; www.vangoghmuseum.nl), comprising a fabulous collection of the artist’s work, is one of Amsterdam’s top attractions.
The museum occupies two modern buildings on the north edge of Museumplein, with the key paintings housed in an angular building designed by a leading