The particular shining glory of the Ryks Museum is Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” and it is well, I think, to make for that picture at once.  The direct approach is down the Gallery of Honour, where one has this wonderful canvas before one all the way, as near life as perhaps any picture ever painted.  It is possible at first to be disappointed:  expectation perhaps had been running too high; the figure of the lieutenant (in the yellow jerkin) may strike one as a little mean.  But do not let this distress you.  Settle down on one of the seats and take Rembrandt easily, “as the leaf upon the tree”; settle down on another, and from the new point of view take him easily, “as the grass upon the weir”.  Look at Van der Helst’s fine company of arquebusiers on one of the side walls; look at Franz Hals’ company of arquebusiers on the other; then look at Rembrandt again.  Every minute his astounding power is winning upon you.  Walk again up the Gallery of Honour and turning quickly at the end, see how much light there is in the “Night Watch”.  Advance upon it slowly....  This is certainly the finest technical triumph of pigment that you have seen.  What a glow and greatness.

After a while it becomes evident that Rembrandt was the only man who ought to have painted arquebusiers at all.  Van der Heist and Frans Hals are sinking to the level of gifted amateurs.  Why did not Rembrandt paint all the pictures? you begin to wonder.  And yet the Hals and the Van der Helsts were so good a little while ago.

Hals and Van der Helst are, however, to recover their own again; for the “Night Watch,” I am told, is to be moved to a building especially erected for it, where the lighting will be more satisfactory than connoisseurs now consider it.  Perhaps it is as well.  It is hard to be so near the rose; and there are few pictures in the recesses of the Gallery of Honour which the “Night Watch” does not weaken; some indeed it makes quite foolish.

It is not of course really a night watch at all.  Captain Franz Banning Cocq’s arquebusiers are leaving their Doelen in broad day; the centralisation of sunlight from a high window led to the mistake, and nothing now will ever change the title.

How little these careless gallant arquebusiers, who paid the painter-man a hundred florins apiece to be included in the picture, can have thought of the destiny of the work!  Of Captain Franz Banning Cocq as a soldier we know nothing, but as a sitter he is hardly second to any in the world.

But it is not the “Night Watch” that I recall with the greatest pleasure when I think of the Ryks Rembrandts.  It is that wise and serene old lady in the Van der Poll room—­Elizabeth Bas—­who sits there for all time, unsurpassed among portraits.  This picture alone is worth a visit to Holland.  I recall also, not with more pleasure than the “Night Watch,” but with little less, the superb group of syndics in the Staalmeester room.  It is this picture—­with the “School of Anatomy” at The Hague—­that in particular makes one wish it had been possible for all the Corporation pieces to have been from Rembrandt’s brush.  It is this picture which deprives even Hals of some of his divinity, and makes Van der Helst a dull dog.  If ever a picture of Dutch gentlemen was painted by a Dutch gentleman it is this.