Nightwatching

In 1642 the celebrated and wealthy Dutch painter Rembrandt reluctantly agrees to paint a group portrait of the Militia Company of Amsterdam Musketeers which will later be known as The Nightwatch, to discover that there is a conspiracy alive among the officers of the Militia who, now that the Spanish wars are over, are essentially burghers and merchants playing at soldiers manoeuvring for financial advantage in the richest city in Europe. Rembrandt uncovers a murder. Rembrandt’s good fortune turns. His wife, Saskia, dies. Rembrandt confronts his commissioners with his painted J’accuse, his indictment in paint of the Militia Company’s treachery. The conspirators deny the accusations in public but they plan revenge. They set out to discredit Rembrandt. They bribe his servant, Geertje, to become his mistress and destroy his reputation with his religious and bourgeois clients in a restrictive moral climate that seeks respectability. They plan his social and financial ruin. They try to blind him. As his clients and the public desert him, Rembrandt finds support and solace in a second servant, Hendrickje. The Nightwatch, exceptional in its theatrical display and manipulation of light, is Rembrandt’s most celebrated painting, though the accused were so successful in their propaganda campaign, it has taken until now to discover its real import, and to realise that although the painting consolidated Rembrandt’s reputation in cultural history as maybe the most successful painter ever in Europe, it also created the circumstances that destroyed him socially and financially in his own lifetime.