Painted within a few years of the original, Lundens' painting shows us what Rembrandt’s masterpiece would have looked like before the canvas was cut on all sides in 1715, wherein it lost 2ft from the top, 2ft from the left, and inches from the right and bottom. As well as losing two figures on the left, the painting lost much of its airy architectural space, and the once off-centre figures of Banning Cocq and his second-in-command Van Ruytenburch was now aligned to the centre, arguably making the painting lose something of its sense of forward motion.

Today this would be an act of criminal vandalism, but it was then fairly common, and was done on the occasion of its removal from the company’s meeting hall to Amsterdam’s City Hall to fit its allocated space, where it remained on public display. In 1885 it moved to the new Rijksmuseum, where it had a gallery built specially for it.

A Cocq and bull story

So did The Night Watch really lead to Rembrandt’s downfall? Perhaps we should look closely at the painting, not for any clues to a conspiracy to murder, but to see how Rembrandt deviated from the norms of a sub-genre that was very popular in the new Dutch Republic: the civic militia portrait, or The Guardroom Scene. And we can make up our minds as to whether the painting might have brought displeasure to those who’d commissioned it.

It was certainly Rembrandt’s most masterly composition to date, which, post cut, still measures almost 12ft x 14ft (3.65 x 4.26m). In this richly hued, tenebrous masterpiece, where light is used to lend the scene an ethereal quality amid the commonplace bustle of movement and action, we detect a certain strangeness, a certain unreality to the scene – even though it’s a painting full of noise.