Kloveniersdoelen & Swych Utrecht Tower
Why is it significant?
Walk along Nieuwe Doelenstraat until you see the round brick tower set into the hotel at the water's edge, half hidden as if it were embarrassed to be so old.
Key Facts
| Place | Kloveniersdoelen & Swych Utrecht Tower |
|---|---|
| Address | Nieuwe Doelenstraat 24, 1012 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36820, 4.89570 |
| Part of Walk | Rembrandt's Amsterdam: The Night Watch, the Syndics & the Amstel |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along Nieuwe Doelenstraat until you see the round brick tower set into the hotel at the water's edge, half hidden as if it were embarrassed to be so old. It is a piece of the medieval city wall, built in the late fifteenth century, and it has a wonderfully cheeky name: Swych Utrecht, roughly, Be quiet, Utrecht... a warning to a rival city.
In the seventeenth century this tower belonged to the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters of the kloveniers, one of Amsterdam's civic militia companies, named after the firearms they carried. These militias were part army, part gentlemen's club. Wealthy citizens drilled now and then, and dined often, in a great hall that stood right here.
In the late 1630s the company decided to decorate the new great hall with group portraits of its members, and it hired the best painters in the city. One of those commissions went to a fashionable young painter from Leiden called Rembrandt van Rijn. He delivered it in 1642: the company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and his lieutenant, marching out in a chaos of light and shadow, drums beating, a girl with a chicken at her belt running through the crowd. Where everyone else painted rows of men posing politely, Rembrandt painted an event.
The painting hung in this hall for decades. Then, in 1715, it was moved to the town hall on Dam Square, where it did not fit the wall it was meant for, and strips were cut from all four sides, most of all from the left. Over the following century the varnish darkened so much that people believed it was a night scene, and the nickname Night Watch was born. It is actually set in daylight.
The hall itself is long gone; the hotel that now stands on the site dates from the nineteenth century. But the tower was here when Rembrandt walked in with his canvas. Now follow the Kloveniersburgwal north and turn right into Staalstraat, a tiny street with a big painting of its own.