In 1642 he received an order to paint a large picture of one of the companies of the City Guard of Amsterdam.  According to the custom of the day, each person portrayed in the picture contributed his equal share towards the cost of the whole, and in return expected his place in it to be as conspicuous as that of anybody else.  Such groups were common in Holland in the seventeenth century.  The towns were proud of their newly won liberties, and the town dignitaries liked to see themselves painted in a group to perpetuate remembrance of their tenure of office.  But Rembrandt knew that it was inartistic to give each and every person in a large group an equal or nearly equal prominence, although such was the custom to which even Franz Hals’ brush had yielded full compliance.  For his magnificent picture of the City Guard, Rembrandt chose the moment when the drums had just been sounded as an order for the men to form into line behind their chief officers’ march-forth.  They are coming out from a dark building into the full sunshine of the street.  All in a bustle, some look at their fire-arms, some lift their lances, and some cock their guns.  The sunshine falls full upon the captain and the lieutenant beside him, but the background is so dark that several of the seventeen figures are almost lost to view.  A few of the heads are turned in such a way that only half the face is seen, and no doubt as likenesses some of them were deficient.  Rembrandt was not thinking of the seventeen men individually.  He conceived the picture as a whole, with its strong light and shade, the picturesque crossing lines of the lances, and the natural array of the figures.  By wiseacres, the picture was said to represent a scene at night, lit by torch-light, and was actually called the ’Night Watch,’ though the shadow of the captain’s hand is of the size of the hand itself, and not greater, being cast by the sun.  Later generations have valued it as one of the unsurpassed pictures in the world; but it is said that contemporary Dutch feeling waxed high against Rembrandt for having dealt in this supremely artistic manner with an order for seventeen portraits, and that he suffered severely in consequence.  Certainly he had fewer orders.  The prosperous class abandoned him.  His pictures remained unsold, and his revenue dwindled.

Rembrandt was thirty-six years of age and at the very height of his powers, at the time of the failure of this his greatest picture.  His mature style of painting continued to displease his contemporaries, who preferred the work of less innovating artists who painted good likenesses smoothly.  Every year his treatment became rougher and bolder.  He transformed portraits of stolid Dutch burgomasters into pictures of fantastic beauty; but the likeness suffered, and the burgomasters were dissatisfied.  Their conservative taste preferred the smooth surface and minute treatment of detail which had been traditional in the Low Countries since the days of the Van Eycks.  Year after year more of their patronage was transferred to other painters, who pandered to their preferences and had less of the genius that forced Rembrandt to work out his own ideal, whether it brought him prosperity or ruin.  These painters flourished, while Rembrandt sank into ever greater disrepute.