Stand before Rembrandt’s Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum

Twelve feet by fourteen, painted in 1642, and hanging at the end of the Gallery of Honour in a hall built specifically around it. It is not a night scene, and it was never called The Night Watch by the man who painted it.

The real title is closer to The Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. The darkness that gave it its nickname was varnish and grime; the cleaning revealed a scene set in daylight. It was also cut down in 1715 to fit a wall in Amsterdam Town Hall — two figures were sliced off the left side and have never been recovered.

What made it revolutionary was movement. Group portraits of civic militia were static rows of paying subjects; Rembrandt painted a company in the act of mustering, with figures overlapping, half-lit, some turned away. Several sitters were reportedly unhappy at being in shadow.

The Gallery of Honour leading up to it holds the rest of the Dutch Golden Age — Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Little Street, Hals, Steen. The Vermeers are small and easy to walk past, and are for many people the better half of the visit.