Everyday Life, and the Night Watch



I have been celebrating the daily life that I had the privilege of witnessing in the wonderful European cities that I visited. The paseo in Madrid, the sunset stroll in which hundreds of people take to the streets, in peaceful enjoyment of their city, and of the cooling-off of the day. And in the Netherlands, people’s practice of carving out small private/public spaces in which to enjoy life together.

Both of these cultural practices strike me as accomplished, successful, sustainable ways to enjoy living. I am trying to understand them more fully. Expectation of unlimited material abundance, naïve and incorrect though it may be, seems fundamental to my experience as an inhabitant of the Americas. My ways of living here grow out of these expectations. I am trying to imagine how to adapt my life here according to what I have seen in Europe.


Celebration of everyday life made its way into Rembrandt's monumental Night Watch. The people in the painting seem to move freely in a crowded space, not unlike the people in the Netherlands of today that I experienced. 

Dutch paintings of militia companies at the time usually organized the people in rows, with even lighting on all the faces, to be sure to please each member of the company, who would have each paid a share of the artist’s fee. Rembrandt did not do this, instead orchestrating a lively, spatial drama, enlivened by variety in lighting and pose. Apparently the militia company was happy with the work, and hung it in their new building.

Painted in 1642, the Night Watch, like Rembrandt’s later Claudius Civilis, was tragically cut down from its original dimensions. Rembrandt himself had cut down the Claudius Civilis when it was rejected by its commissioners. The Night Watch was reduced in size in 1715, 46 years after Rembrandt’s death, so that it could fit into a smaller space in the Amsterdam Town Hall.

The drawing above is my second sketch from the painting. In this one I wanted to include the entirety of the two main figures, and the ground plane, to appreciate the sense of space I was experiencing in the painting.

I was rereading some of my notes that I wrote in the museum, as I was studying the painting, and taking a break from drawing. I wrote about how I was disappointed by the overall design of the Night Watch. It seemed haphazard, it didn’t make sense, compared to Las Meninas, or Titian’s Entombment, and other great works by those other great artists.

I think this is because I was not, in fact, seeing Rembrandt’s original composition.  As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, I think Rembrandt was actually a very precise artist, in a deep and interesting way. I would love to see the original versions of his two monumental, now-reduced multi-figure masterpieces. A worthy time travel destination: Amsterdam, in about 1660, when both paintings were still intact.

Here is a link to the interesting Wikipedia page on the Night Watch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch

And here is a link to Wikipedia’s page on a Frans Hals militia painting, for comparison to the Night Watch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Officers_of_the_St_Adrian_Militia_Company_in_1633


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