gure of each member of the company who had subscribed a hundred florins.
Rembrandt gave them a work of art. No doubt the captain and his lieutenant
were well enough pleased, for they stride forth in the forefront of the
picture, but the rank and file were bitterly hostile. From the painting of
_The Night Watch_ his popularity began to wane.

The history of this picture, after it had been hung in the Doelen or
assembly hall belonging to Captain Cocq's company, was as troublous as the
later life of Rembrandt. Years afterwards when, blackened with smoke and
ill-usage, it was removed from the Doelen to the Hotel de Ville, the
authorities, finding that it was too large for the space it was destined to
occupy, deliberately cut a piece away from each side. This is proved by a
copy of the picture made by Lundens before the mutilation, now in the
National Gallery. When M. Hopman undertook the restoration of _The Night
Watch_ he discovered, when he had removed the surface of dirt, that the
sortie is taking place by daylight, and that the work contained something
that Rembrandt evidently intended should represent a ray of sunlight. But
the popular name of the picture is still _The Night Watch_.

The ladies of the Dorcas Society expressed in eyes and gestures their
disapproval of the Amsterdam vandals who mutilated _The Night Watch_. One
of them remarked: "It happened a long time ago. So gross a barbarity could
not be perpetrated now."

Twenty years later, at the age of fifty-six, Rembrandt, having known what
it was to be homeless and penniless, painted his masterpiece, _The Syndics
of the Cloth Hall_, merely five figures grouped round a table, with a
servant, uncovered, in attendance. It is an extraordinarily real picture,
the final statement of Rembrandt's knowledge of painting, combined with
that rare power of seeing things just as they are--the hundred subtleties
that the untrained eye never sees, as well as the accents that all see. It
is the perfect painter's vision--a scene grasped as a whole, character
searched out but not insistent, the most delicate suggestion of equally
diffused light knitting the figures together. He made no attempt to be
picturesque as in _The Night Watch_; he was content just to paint five men
dressed in black, with flat white collars and broad-brimmed hats, and a
servant. With these simple materials Rembrandt produced the picture that
the world has agreed to regard as his masterpiece. Contemporary cr