The Night Watch
Rembrandt
From the picture in the Ryks Museum
After a while it becomes evident that Rembrandt was the only man who ought to have painted arquebusiers at all. Van der Heist and Frans Hals are sinking to the level of gifted amateurs. Why did not Rembrandt paint Page 177all the pictures? you begin to wonder. And yet the Hals and the Van der Helsts were so good a little while ago.
Hals and Van der Helst are, however, to recover their own again; for the “[Night Watch],” I am told, is to be moved to a building especially erected for it, where the lighting will be more satisfactory than connoisseurs now consider it. Perhaps it is as well. It is hard to be so near the rose; and there are few pictures in the recesses of the Gallery of Honour which the “[Night Watch]” does not weaken; some indeed it makes quite foolish.
It is not of course really a night watch at all. Captain Franz Banning Cocq’s arquebusiers are leaving their Doelen in broad day; the centralisation of sunlight from a high window led to the mistake, and nothing now will ever change the title.
How little these careless gallant arquebusiers, who paid the painter-man a hundred florins apiece to be included in the picture, can have thought of the destiny of the work! Of Captain Franz Banning Cocq as a soldier we know nothing, but as a sitter he is hardly second to any in the world.
But it is not the “[Night Watch]” that I recall with the greatest pleasure when I think of the Ryks Rembrandts. It is that wise and serene old lady in the Van der Poll room—[Elizabeth Bas]—who sits there for all time, unsurpassed among portraits. This picture alone is worth a visit to Holland. I recall also, not with more pleasure than the “[Night Watch],” but with little less, the superb group of syndics in the Staalmeester room. It is this picture—with the “School of Anatomy” at The Hague—that in particular makes one wish it had been possible for Page 178all the Corporation pieces to have been from Rembrandt’s brush. It is this picture which deprives even Hals of some of his divinity, and makes Van der Helst a dull dog. If ever a picture of Dutch gentlemen was painted by a Dutch gentleman it is this.
Having seen the “[Night Watch]” again, it is a good plan to study the Gallery of Honour. To pick out one’s favourite picture is here not difficult: it is No. 1501, “The Endless Prayer,” by Nicolas Maes, of which I have said something in the chapter on Dordrecht, the painter’s birthplace. Its place is very little below that of [Elizabeth Bas], by Maes’s master.
It is always interesting in a fine gallery to ask oneself which single picture one would choose before all others if such a privilege were offered. The answer if honest is a sure revelation of temperament, for one would select of a certainty a picture satisfying one’s prevailing moods rather than a picture of any sensational character. In other words, the picture would have to be good to live with. To choose from thousands of masterpieces one only is a very delicate test.