But the popular name of the picture is still _The Night Watch_.
The ladies of the Dorcas Society expressed in eyes and gestures their disapproval of the Amsterdam vandals who mutilated _The Night Watch_.

One of them remarked: "It happened a long time ago.

So gross a barbarity could not be perpetrated now." Twenty years later, at the age of fifty-six, Rembrandt, having known what it was to be homeless and penniless, painted his masterpiece, _The Syndics of the Cloth Hall_, merely five figures grouped round a table, with a servant, uncovered, in attendance.

It is an extraordinarily real picture, the final statement of Rembrandt's knowledge of painting, combined with that rare power of seeing things just as they are--the hundred subtleties that the untrained eye never sees, as well as the accents that all see.

It is the perfect painter's vision--a scene grasped as a whole, character searched out but not insistent, the most delicate suggestion of equally diffused light knitting the figures together.