The Night Watch

The Night Watch — officially titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq — was commissioned around 1639 by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and seventeen members of his Kloveniers civic militia company, each paying one hundred guilders for a total fee of 1,600 guilders. It was made to hang in the banquet hall of the newly built Kloveniersdoelen in Amsterdam, one of the city's militia headquarters. In 1715 it was moved to the Amsterdam Town Hall, where it was trimmed on all four sides — losing two figures on the left, the top of the arch, a balustrade, and the edge of a step — presumably to fit between two columns. The cut-off portions have never been found. When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands and converted the Town Hall into the Palace on the Dam, the painting was relocated to the Trippenhuis, where it remained until the Rijksmuseum opened in 1885. The painting is technically in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum and on permanent loan to the Rijksmuseum, where it has held pride of place in the Gallery of Honour since the building opened. It was evacuated in September 1939 and spent the Second World War rolled around a cylinder in a cave in the St. Pietersberg near Maastricht. The painting has survived three attacks: a knife assault in 1911 that was absorbed by the varnish layer, a bread-knife attack in 1975 that inflicted twelve slashes and required four years of restoration, and an acid attack in 1990 that penetrated only the varnish. The popular title dates to 1797 and derives from centuries of accumulated dark varnish that gave the painting a nocturnal appearance; the varnish was removed in the 1940s. In July 2019 the Rijksmuseum began Operation Night Watch, the most technologically extensive restoration and research campaign in the painting's history, conducted in a glass enclosure in the museum and livestreamed to the public.