Operation Night Watch, September 7, 2022
Content warning: anxiety, hospitals.
On Monday, I took myself to the Rijksmuseum, where I welled up in front of The Night Watch, looking at Rembrandt peeking ever so knowingly at me from the edge of his canvas. This painting, one of his most famous, has undergone intensive conservation and research in the last two years under “Operation Night Watch” and is currently on display once more, encased in a huge glass room containing its new, closely monitored aluminum stretcher and other large in situ conservation implements. I wonder how this painted Rembrandt felt as he watched his work be re-stretched, the choices he erased unearthed again by X-rays, each sign of chemical or physical aging meticulously documented. Incidentally, the top left corner of the canvas that was buckling and prompted this restoration is right above Rembrandt’s self-portrait. Was painted-Rembrandt shy to receive so much attention and care? Or did he revel in the theatrics and fanfare of this most recent restoration, and the meaning it imparts to the look we share? Was it perhaps the accumulation of the infinitesimal mass of millions upon millions of shared looks between painted-Rembrandt and onlookers like me that eventually tugged at that corner of the canvas, demanding a new skeleton to bear the weight of its resonant body…
When I arrived in Amsterdam last week, I was in the midst of a sudden bout of very excruciating abdominal pain. I believe this and the cold I’ve caught since are physical manifestations of months of work stress followed by acute anxiety about this trip. To my great humiliation, at my detour to the ER upon landing, I learned from my typically brusque Dutch doctor that nothing physically was the matter with me. Or, at least, that the severity of my pain and the intensity of the experiences of the last few months could not be validated or measured by a blood test.
When I look at Rembrandt, I want to cry because I wonder if he understands how I feel. This Rembrandt is both the author of the work and one of its subjects—that is, eternally subject to another, past Rembrandt’s creative choices and to the conditions of his physical painting. I too am in a place where I feel both in control of my life like never before and at the mercy of past decisions and their perpetual impacts on my present body. When Rembrandt looks out of his own painting, I feel he is breaking the proverbial fourth wall to see me. Even the way I’m sharing my recent experiences in this post is its own kind of glass house, my own theatrical display of my ongoing restoration. But maybe it matters that this process is shared and even dramatized, to show the massive amounts of labour and love that goes into healing and its maintenance.
