Dali House

… No, not “Night Watch” – “Day Watch” – although Rembrandt’s 1642 conversation piece at the venerable Rijksmuseum will always be known as “Night Watch”. It is in fact “The Company of Captain Frans Cocq”, the militia that paid Rembrandt darned good money to paint their portrait in broad daylight, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse, last of three parts

Fully 300 years after he did, someone realised they were looking at it through a gloom of grit and this wasn’t suppertime at all. They sent it to the cleaners and it came back ready for breakfast, much cheerier now, thankyou.

You can scour the Internet all you want, though, and most of the images of it are still grubby. Maybe there’s a lot of smog on the Web as well as smut. On the other hand, it looks better darker, psychological proof that the night tells better stories. If you haven’t already, rest your cursor on the image above for a comparison.

Anyway, it’s cheerier and in mint condition once more, although it’s said that if you “see it in person” (as it were), you can spot the zig-zag of slashes added in 1975 by someone who evidently thought he was Zorro. The restorers couldn’t quite stitch it up right after the unfortunate critiquing, but never mind, “Night Watch” had endured worse before, as we’ll see.

Captain Cocq (no “Star Trek” jokes, please) and 17 members of his civic militia guards paid Rembrandt a tidy 100 guilders each to convey them in pigment. Sheer vanity, one might say, since they hired six other artists to do likewise at the same time.

There are 18 names on the shield in the centre-right background – the drummer was hired as a model, so he “was allowed in the painting for free”, Wikipedia says, without explaining the other 16 people who somehow sneaked in.

These narcissists-at-arms wanted the paintings for the banquet hall of their new Musketeers’ clubhaus in Amsterdam, possibly because France’s Queen Marie de’Medici was due for a “visit” in 1638 (she was actually on the lam from her own son, Louis XIII).

Rembrandt got right at his version but somehow didn’t manage to finish it until four years later, although, in his defence, it was freaking 14 feet by 11 feet and one hell of a picture, all whirling activity and a good dollop of symbolism besides.

The painting stayed active even after he’d handed it over. The troops carried it from one place to another. In 1715 it was moved to the Amsterdam town hall, but it didn’t fit right, see, so they sawed off the left side, ending the modelling careers of three of its characters.

Then Napoleon took over the Netherlands and “Night Watch” was moved around some more, like in a “Carry On” movie, but at least it never went out of sight like it did when the Nazis came knocking. It spent more than five years rolled up around a cylinder in a bunker beneath the cheesy Limburg hills. It still smells funny.

So who’s who in this behemoth of a glamour pin-up?

This is Captain Frans Banning Cocq and his No 2, Willem “Spock” van Ruytenburch. Both are depicted very expressively, but if I were to speculate on what exactly was passing between them, I could think of nothing other than, “You see, Spock? How am I supposed to keep order in the city with this lot?”

This is the company’s ensign, Jan Visscher Cornelisen. You can tell because he’s carrying the company’s ensign. Hey wait a second! Isn’t that … ? Nah, couldn’t be.

And this is Captain Van Purmerland giving orders to Van Vlaerdingen to find them a more central location somewhere in the picture. The former is toting one of the long-barrelled rifles from which this militia derived its emergency backup name, the Arquebusiers. They were mainly known as Kloveniers, but only gun nuts care about this stuff.

You have to love the extras in the picture, like these two clowns ignoring the director’s command to never look at the camera.

The little girl hogging the spotlight (and lending ample testimony to charges that Rembrandt could not paint a good-looking female) is some sort of mascot. That chicken she’s got harnessed to her waist symbolises both the Arquebusiers, who sometimes also called themselves Clauweniers, and a defeated enemy, fittingly enough.

She’s also dressed in yellow, the colour of victory, and packing a pistol that similarly signifies the militia. The guy breezing past her in a hurry has yet another insignia in his helmet, an oak leaf.

Then there’s the dog, either barking at or barking with the troops. He was almost lost in the smog until they cleaned the painting up, but it looks like Rembrandt pretty much painted him as a ghost dog anyway.

Wikipedia, by the way, always strives to give the full picture (no pun intended), and among the trivia it lists is the fact that “Nightwatch” is the name of the US Air Force 747 that would be the president’s airborne command post in case anything freaky happens on the ground, as it sometimes does.