Saving The Night Watch

When you enter the Rijksmuseum, it doesn’t really look like a painting.  Instead, at first glance, you assume there is a group of actors in period costume, interacting with the museum patrons.  It is only after you notice that none of the actors are moving that you realize it is a painting—in this case, the most famous painting in the Netherlands. 

The painting is commonly called The Night Watch, though this is a horribly inaccurate name, since it depicts neither watchmen nor a night scene.  As Rembrandt painted it, it was a group portrait of a company of militia, walking down a street in the daytime.  After almost four centuries, the varnish that Rembrandt used to cover and protect his painting has darkened with age.  Technically, this work is better titled, Officers and Men of the Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Wilhelm van Ruytenburgh.

It would probably be a little tough to print museum signs for the latter name.  Today, experts can’t even agree on the informal name.  Is it The Night Watch or The Nightwatch? 

At eleven by fourteen feet, the painting is enormous—which is even more remarkable when you consider that a couple of centuries ago, all four sides were trimmed in order to make it fit in its new location in the city hall when it was moved there from the military guild hall.  The lopped off pieces are still missing. 

One of the reasons the work was so large was because the painter, Rembrandt van Rijn, was paid by each person in the painting, and the price varied depending on your how prominently a person was displayed.  (Presumably, Rembrandt put his own self-portrait into the work of art for free (or at least at a deep discount.  If you look very carefully, you can just see his right eye staring out from behind the man wearing a helmet in the center.)

Regardless of what the painting is called, the history of how the museum has labored over the years to protect it from vandals and thieves is remarkable.  Despite guards, It has been stabbed with a bread knife, sprayed with acid, and slashed by a shoemaker’s knife.  And like most of the art in Europe, the Nazis wanted to steal it and take it home for der Fuehrer.

Long before the Nazis marched westward through the low countries, Willem Sandberg, a conservator at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam became concerned about the theft of art from Jewish families in Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933.  Equally alarming to Sandberg was the wide scale theft of art that had occurred during the Spanish Civil War.

Since Sandberg had traveled to Spain during the Civil War and had seen how the Prado Museum had hidden its art work in caves, when the Dutch government appointed a committee to preserve the artifacts of Dutch heritage, Sandberg was put in charge.  The committee also could count on the services of several experts.  Sandberg later wrote that the expert on air pressure was still arguing with the expert on fungi when the Nazis arrived.   Thankfully, Sandberg had ignored the rest of the committee and had had done as he wanted.  (This is pretty much how most committees and juries work—either they do the bidding of one forceful person or they deadlock and nothing is accomplished.  France was run by a committee.)

Roughly twenty miles outside of Amsterdam, a secret bunker was dug into the side of a sand dune.  One can only imagine the difficulties in preparing a secret, underground, and waterproof warehouse in a country where most land is below the water table.  You obviously do not have a lot of suitable sites to choose from if your best choice is soft sand.

Once the project was started, Sandberg not only protected the art from his museum, but from other institutions such as the Rijksmuseum, and even from private collections.  By the end of the war, art from over 500 collections, including works from the Van Gogh and Mondrian family were kept safe.   

It is important to remember that the Nazis not only stole the art they coveted, they also destroyed the art they either disliked or didn’t understand.  When Hitler held an art show in Munich of stolen “deviant art”, he was dismayed when half a million Germans flocked to see the work of “moral and cultural degenerates.”  The art show was never repeated and over a thousand works were burned.  Many times that number were sold to foreign buyers, with an alarming amount of the art never returned to the rightful owners.

Still more works of art were lost after they were looted and moved to Germany only to be destroyed by Allied bombing before the end of the war.  These works include masterpieces by such artists as Caravaggio, Klimt, and Courbet.  Van Gogh’s self-portrait (right) was lost when Berlin was bombed. 

As the German army neared Amsterdam, a surprising amount of art was hidden by Sandberg.  Eventually, it took several bunkers to hide all the art.  And what of The Night Watch? 

It reached the bunker the day the Netherlands surrendered.  Transported by truck to the bunker, it was carefully removed from its frame.  A similar sized painting, The Battle of Waterloo by Pienerman was wrapped around a long wooden pole, and The Night Watch was wrapped around the outside of that painting.  The long round cylinder was then carefully crated and spent the next five years in the camouflaged bunker.

Most of the people responsible for creating the bunkers were eventually arrested by the Germans and many were executed.  Luckily, Sandberg was in the bunker when the Gestapo came to his house looking for him, so he escaped capture and spent the rest of the war working for the Resistance, creating false identity papers for Dutch Jews.  Sandberg's wife was among those arrested, and she spent fifteen months in prison. 

The Germans never found the bunker—though not for lack of trying.  After the war, the Dutch authorities have spent decades trying to find the rightful owners of  the privately owned artworks, but, sadly—even after seventy-three years of continued attempts—they have still been unable to return many of the works to either their owners or to  those owners' heirs.  Compared with the lack of effort of some European governments, however, the Dutch are to be commended for their continuing efforts.

I’m happy to say that The Night Watch is still hanging in Rijksmuseum, whose curators are still taking great pains to insure the work’s safety.  The huge painting is mounted on rails, and in the event of an emergency (such as a fire or the sudden arrival of the German Army), it can slide down through the floor into the safety of a private, secure new bunker.