Night patrol (1642) is one of the Flemish painter’s masterpieces Rembrandtas well as the main work exhibited at Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, the most important museum for local history, which has the largest collection of paintings of Dutch Golden Age (between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century).
The painting, also known as “Night Watch” or “The Marching Civic Guard”, represents the Amsterdam Arquebusiers’ Guild, and is a real national symbol: it is so important that in 1934, to allow it to be hidden in case of emergency (such as fires or floods), a trapdoor to allow it to be quickly evacuated from the museum and hidden.
But let’s take a step back to explain why this painting is so important to the history of the Netherlands. After the secession of Belgium from the kingdom in 1830, the Netherlands needed a work that represented their national art and this monumental oil on canvas was chosen (we are talking about a size of 359×438 cm).
The central subject of the work is Captain Frans Banning Cocq, flanked by his guild of arquebusiers and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh: it was the captain himself who commissioned the work from Rembrandt in 1639, when he arrived in Amsterdam with great pomp Maria de’ Medici, already queen of France as second wife of Henry IV (from 1600 to 1610) and then exiled to Brussels for some years for an attempted conspiracy. The painting – which, unlike all the other works, is not owned by the State but by the city of Amsterdam – has however become famous because it is one of the best ever made by the famous artist.
For this reason, when to the architect Pierre Cuypers was commissioned to design the museum building in 1876, he took particular care of the Night patrol. The museum was given the appearance of a cathedral, and the high altar was this painting: visitors enter its gallery through an imposing atrium, reaching the canvas as if it were a relic.
However, the room that houses it has an unusual feature: there are several joints in the parquet floor in front of the painting. To understand why we need to go back to a time of great fear and pain in the Netherlands: 1934, a year after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Netherlands feared invasion. The museum management therefore had one created trap door in the floora kind of huge slot and mailbox shape which would have allowed the evacuation of the work in the event of an emergency.
This cut in the floor would have flowed into the ceiling of the tunnel under the museum, used today as passage for bicycles. And in fact even today, going to look into the tunnel, you will find the exit of this ingenious trap door.
But was it ever used? Yes, due to the threat of war, the canvas was brought to safety through this emergency exit in 1939 and for much of the Second World War, it was stored in caves beneath Sint-Pietersberg, near Maastricht.
