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 all the Corporation pieces to have been from Rembrandt's brush.
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