The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, known as 'The Night Watch' (copy)

This small panel was probably ordered by Frans Banninck Cocq himself, the captain at the centre of Rembrandt's Night Watch. It was painted within a few years of the original and stayed in the captain's circle, and a watercolour of the same composition was made for his family album.

Its value comes from what later happened to the big canvas. In 1715 Rembrandt's painting was cut down on every side to fit a wall in Amsterdam's town hall, and the strips were never found. Here the composition is still whole. At the far left stand two men and a child who are missing from the original, and more of the drummer shows at the right.

The copy belongs to the National Gallery in London, which received it in 1857 under the will of a clergyman, Thomas Halford. In 2021 the Rijksmuseum used it as the guide when it reconstructed the lost strips with the help of artificial intelligence and for a time hung them around the original. Now the panel itself is in Amsterdam on long-term loan.