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At the end of a long gallery hangs Rembrandt's 'Night Watch', a militia company bursting into movement as their captain steps forward, painted in 1642. It is not quite the picture Rembrandt made. In 1715 the city moved it into the town hall, found it too wide for the wall, and trimmed strips off all four sides, cutting away two figures on the left for good. The museum has been studying and cleaning it inside a glass enclosure in full public view, a project it calls Operation Night Watch.
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands, built to tell the country's story as much as to hang its paintings. Pierre Cuypers gave it a cathedral-like brick front in 1885, so crowded with Dutch history that critics at the time grumbled it looked more like a church than a museum. A ten-year renovation closed it almost completely, and it reopened in 2013 with the old picture halls restored.
The heart of it is the Golden Age, the 17th century when this small trading nation was briefly the richest in Europe and its citizens wanted themselves and their world painted. Vermeer's 'Milkmaid' pours her thin stream of milk in a plain room, still and exact. Around her hang the militia portraits, the sea battles and the frozen-canal scenes that these merchants and burghers commissioned of their own world.
