In November, The Night Watch will be off the wall for a few weeks and will be placed in a specially designed 'holder' in the front of the glass room. This will give researchers and conservators the opportunity to study the painting from the reverse as well. It forms a unique opportunity for the public to see the reverse of the painting. This happens only rarely, because Rembrandt's masterpiece always hangs against the wall. The last time was during the treatment of 1975-'76. So what exactly are we looking at?
Lining
Contrary to what you might expect, we now no longer see the canvas on which Rembrandt painted his masterpiece. In fact, there are few examples of seventeenth century Dutch masters where the original linen is still visible on the reverse. The vast majority of paintings on canvas have in the past been lined. Lining basically means that an extra canvas – a support canvas – is glued to the reverse. For The Night Watch, we know that this has happened at least four times during its existence; the last time was in 1975 after the knife attack on September 14. A brief history of the linings of The Night Watch is described elsewhere on this website. The canvas that we now see on the reverse of The Night Watch is therefore the lining canvas from 1975.
Stretcher
The painting is stretched with nails on a so-called stretcher. This is a construction of wooden slats, which can be made larger or smaller with the help of the wedge-shaped keys in the corners. Originally The Night Watch would have been stretched onto a strainer, a fixed framework of wooden slats of which the size could not be adjusted. Stretchers are an eighteenth-century invention, but they only became popular during the nineteenth century. We know from sources that in 1935 an older stretcher of The Night Watch was replaced by a new one.
Labels
On that old stretcher there were some labels with short notes on past restorations from 1889 and 1906. The stretcher from 1935 was replaced again in 1976, because it did not show enough of the original paint layers in the new frame, which also dates from 1976. Apart from labels about old restorations, we often see labels from past exhibitions on the reverse of stretchers, small testimonies of all places that a painting visited in the past. But because The Night Watch has been lent to an exhibition only once during its existence - to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1898 - we do not find any labels on the current stretcher.
Special
Although you do not see seventeenth-century elements anymore, it is important to remember that it is the result of a very rich conservation history. Moreover, think about how special is it to be able to say that you have seen the reverse of The Night Watch with your own eyes!
