They are restoring 'The Night Watch' (actually 'Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq') so they took a bunch of very high resolution pictures. You can zoom in to minute detail here.
In a sense, it's kind of missing the point. I stood in front of this in 1968 having walked a mile in the sunshine from the Heineken Brewery - a tour and a sample or two of what I then thought was one of the world's great beers. (It's OK, I'm better now.) This picture is approx 12 x 14 feet so it won't fit over your mantlepiece. 168 sq feet = more than five 4 x 8 sheets. I've had smaller apartments. You have to stand back 20 feet or more just to see what's going on.
It's one of those sights that is so awe-inspiring that you don't forget it. All the more so in my case because I wasn't expecting it. My friend Sid and I were hitchhiking around Europe: he to see the cultural sites and me to swig as much free beer as possible. So our planned itinerary - apart from sleeping rough for three weeks with an occasional night in a youth hostel to get a shower because after a while you can't get upwind of yourself - was a mixed bag of brewery and museum visits. Sid insisted on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - I had no idea. He was familiar with this painting from books and as far as I recall I wasn't. Some things take your breath away and sober you right up. If you are even in Amsterdam please see this picture.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
A companion piece. Things I never knew about the artist.
Thanks, x-kA
A Cocq and bull story
So did The Night Watch really lead to Rembrandt’s downfall? Perhaps we should look closely at the painting, not for any clues to a conspiracy to murder, but to see how Rembrandt deviated from the norms of a sub-genre that was very popular in the new Dutch Republic: the civic militia portrait, or The Guardroom Scene. And we can make up our minds as to whether the painting might have brought displeasure to those who’d commissioned it."
