Did Rembrandt reveal a murder plot in one of his paintings?
Throughout history, people have been obsessed with finding hidden messages and building conspiracy theories around artworks. Are they looking to find a golden nugget that could make an artwork more interesting? Perhaps they want some credit for discovering something novel about a century-old painting, or people are just bored.
This was the case with Rembrandt’s famous painting The Night Watch, which instinctively seems like a fairly typical Flemish baroque painting. It’s massive in size, a whopping 12ft x 14ft (3.65m x 4.26m), which was pretty typical of historical paintings. The colour palette is also standard, recalling that of earlier Caravaggio works, centred around dark red, brown and creamy whites, which create both a tenebrous and ethereal quality.
But in 2009, all of this baroque ‘ordinariness’ was flipped on its head. The experimental filmmaker Peter Greenaway proposed a totally new, mind-boggling narrative to the painting that changed its reception forever. Greenaway made a documentary titled Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, which argued that Rembrandt disseminated a bunch of obscure clues in the painting referring to a murder, corruption and prostitution of the characters presented. He argued that the painting was more of a public service announcement (PSA) that there was a murder plot that led to members of the militia threatening Rembrandt’s life and leading to his ruin.
Back then, without social media, where one could post about whatever they wanted, perhaps this was the only way for Rembrandt to let people know what was happening. The film, which was presented at multiple festivals in North America, suggests that the protagonist, Captain Frans Banning Cocq, murdered his way to the top of the ranks. Amsterdam in the 17th century was a wild and violent place, so this hypothesis doesn’t sound entirely ridiculous.
Let’s take a look at the hints that Greenaway mentions. It’s important to note that his analysis was based on multiple X-rays of each inch of the painting.
The first, and in my opinion creepiest, is the ambiguous eye of someone peering over the shoulders of the crowd in the upper left of Banning Cocq. It’s unclear who this person is, but it is assumed that it belongs to the artist himself, which was a signature move of many Flemish artists, like Jan van Eyck, for example.
The next theory, which has only ever been expressed in Greenaway’s documentary, is that while Rembrandt was working on the sketch of the painting, the militia head was killed in a random shooting. Greenaway argues that, as a result, The Night Watch became a sort of brainstorming map onto which Rembrandt began to piece together the story of the random murder, realising that many of the subjects featured were involved. Thus, the painting serves to expose them discreetly, throwing a few other examples of their corruption into the mix. The little girl wearing gold, with the chicken wrapped around her waist, for example, allegedly signifies the child brothels that these militia members patronised.
Then, the most outlandish theory is that Banning Cocq represents Satan in his red and black outfit, pointing towards hell. This analysis seems like quite a stretch, but Greenaway believes that 17th-century citizens observing the painting would have understood these coded messages.
Greenaway certainly didn’t have a time travel machine to fact-check these theories with Rembrandt, but I suppose there’s a sense of excitement that these hidden narratives might have been intentional and true.
