Who painted The Night Watch?

Rembrandt, in 1642, and it is not a night scene. Centuries of darkened varnish gave it the name; cleaning in 1947 revealed daylight. The actual title is a mouthful about the militia company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and it is a group portrait of the sort Amsterdam civic guards commissioned regularly, with each man paying a share.

What Rembrandt did with the form was the radical part. Group portraits of this kind were normally rows of faces, evenly lit, everyone equally visible for their money. He painted a company in motion, mid-muster, with figures overlapping, some in shadow, some obscured, and a strange small illuminated girl in the middle who is not a militiaman at all. The story that the sitters were furious appears to be a later invention - the painting was hung in the guild hall and admired.

It has been attacked three times, cut down once, and is currently the subject of the largest art-conservation project ever undertaken - conducted in public behind glass at the Rijksmuseum, with the results published openly. It was trimmed on all sides in 1715 to fit a wall, removing two figures from the left; in 2021 the missing strips were reconstructed by an artificial intelligence trained on a seventeenth-century copy and displayed alongside the original.