We know what to think of the effect produced by the Night Watch when it appeared in 1642.  This memorable attempt was neither understood nor relished.  It added noise to Rembrandt’s glory, increased it in the eyes of his faithful admirers, and compromised it in the eyes of those who had only followed him with some effort and attended him to this decisive point.  It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure.  It heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or the stiffness of their reason.  In short, it was regarded as an absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody.  If you know the judgment expressed on this subject by Rembrandt’s contemporaries, his friends and his pupils, you know that opinion has not sensibly varied for two centuries, and that we repeat almost the same thing that this great daring man might have heard during his lifetime....

Save one or two frank colours, two reds and a deep violet, except one or two flashes of blue, you cannot perceive anything in this colourless and violent canvas to recall the palette and ordinary method of any of the known colourists.  The heads have the appearance rather than the colouring proper to life.  They are red, purple, or pale, without for all that having the true paleness Velasquez gives to his faces, or those sanguine, yellowish, greyish, or purplish shades that Frans Hals renders with such skill when he desires to specify the temperaments of his personages.  In the clothes and hair and various parts of the accoutrements, the colour is no more exact nor expressive than is, as I have said, the form itself.  When a red appears, it is not of a delicate nature and it indistinctly expresses silk, cloth, or satin.  The guard loading his musket is clothed in red from head to foot, from his hat to his boots.  Do you perceive that Rembrandt has occupied himself for a moment with the varied physiognomy of this red, its nature or substance, as a true colourist would not have failed to do?...

I defy any one to tell me how the lieutenant is dressed and in what colour.  Is it white tinged with yellow?  Is it yellow faded to white?  The truth is that this personage having to express the central light of the picture, Rembrandt has clothed him with light, very ably with regard to brilliance and very negligently with regard to colour.

Now, and it is here that Rembrandt begins to show himself, for a colourist there is no light in the abstract.  Light of itself is nothing:  it is the result of colours diversely illumined and diversely radiating in accordance with the nature of the ray that they transmit or absorb.  One very deep tint may be extraordinarily luminous; another very light one on the contrary may not be at all luminous.  There is not a student in the schools who does not know that.  With the colourists, then, the light depends exclusively upon the choice of the colours