Rembrandt's great "Night Watch" did not meet the usual criteria of group portraiture of his time. Save for the captain and lieutenant in the center foreground, the 18 militiamen who paid for the painting did not receive the prominence they may have hoped for. Instead, they found themselves engulfed in an enormous Baroque work, which is not methodically representational but furiously dramatic-a revolutionary explosion of color and movement. To their credit, the militiamen never recorded an objection to this extraordinary treatment, or to the 16 extraneous figures (who paid nothing) added by Rembrandt to heighten the sense of drama, or even to such unorthodox details ... . The scurrying little girl - a white bird with bluish-grey feathers at her waist - scarcely merits a proper place among bold soldiers, but she echoes Rembrandt's central accord of red and yellow colors. The mischievous urchin next to her, firing a musket close to the ear of the yellow-clad lieutenant, would also have seemed improper to a lesser artist; actually the flame of the blast blends into the plumes of the officer's hat. While there were no quarrels with Rembrandt's masterpiece during his lifetime, it remained for later pedants to conclude, inexplicably, that the artist had produced a colossal failure, one that precipitated his downfall.
