Rembrandt Night Watch

The Night Watch by Rembrandt The night watch is an oil painting done by Rembrandt Van Rijin during the Dutch golden age in 1642. The painting is large in size and stands at 11.91 feet tall and 14.34 feet wide.
The Night Watch portrays a busy group of militia men starting to march into action. There are men pointing their swords, holding long spears and men with guns drawn. There are two men who stand on the foreground, one looks to be the captain and is wearing a dark robe with a white collar and red sash, and the other looks to be his lieutenant, in pale yellow with a white sash. There are three different groups of men who accompany the captain and are clustered together in chaos around him. Every figure is differently aligned and pointing their weapons in all directions. Each group has a central leader whom the surrounding men are looking to for directions. There is a man in red almost on the foreground who is loading his rifle. There is a young boy in
The visual weight is not concentrated to one central area, but distributed over the entirety of the painting. The 3 groups of men make a clustered line behind the 2 leaders and span from the outermost edges. Though the value applied to the men ranges and remains somewhat central it doesn’t take away the visual weight of the darker values. Although the archway in the background is off centered, it doesn’t take away from the balance of the piece. The unity of the painting can be see through this consistency of value and color.
Rembrants use of scale can be seen in the depiction of the girl with the dead chicken. Although her features would lead us to believe she is an older woman, because she is smaller is size she is known to be a young girl. You can also see this in the boy with his back turned, who appears to be fleeing. Even though his back is turned and we cannot see his face, because of his size we can say with some certainty he is a younger