The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild

Rembrandt's problem was to make six men in identical clothes into a picture. He did it with the low viewpoint, so that we seem to look up at them from the floor of the hall where the painting was to hang high on a wall, and with tiny disturbances of symmetry: the rising man, the hand on the book, the servant without a hat. X ray images show he moved the figures several times before he found this arrangement. Look at the sixth face, the servant, which is painted with as much respect as the others, and at the red of the carpet, which warms the whole austere scheme. The panelling behind them catches a light that seems to come from the same window as the light on their collars.

The painting hung in the cloth hall of Amsterdam for a century and a half and came to the city collection when the guilds were dissolved. It has been on loan to the Rijksmuseum since 1808. Because it is so quiet beside the drama of the Night Watch it is easily passed, and yet painters from Manet to Bacon have named it as the group portrait against which all others are measured. Its faces are also famous for having appeared for decades on the packaging of an American brand of cigars.

Did You Know? The syndics' faces were printed on the lid of Dutch Masters cigar boxes for most of the twentieth century, making this the most widely seen Rembrandt in America.