Rijksmuseum audio guide,
five stops, free.

Give this one time before you decide what it is. The panel is a metre and a third across, and there are almost two hundred people on it.

Hendrick Avercamp painted it around 1608, in oil on wood, and he set the viewpoint high, as though you were standing on a roof at the edge of the village. That is the move that makes the whole thing work. From up here nothing is the main subject, and the picture turns into a survey of what an entire town does when the water freezes.

The museum's own description is careful about that mixture. Hundreds of people are out on the ice, it says, most of them for pleasure, others working out of dire necessity. Both are in front of you. There are couples skating arm in arm and children coming off their feet, and there are people hauling and pushing loads across the ice, because for a few weeks the frozen river is the road.

Now go to the bottom left corner. Crows and a dog are eating the carcass of a horse that froze to death. Avercamp put it in the same picture as the skating parties, in the same light, at the same size, and made no comment about it at all.

The painter is worth knowing. Hendrick Avercamp was born in Amsterdam in 1585 and died in Kampen in 1634. He was mute and probably deaf, and he was known as de Stomme van Kampen, the mute of Kampen. He trained in Amsterdam with the portrait painter Pieter Isaacsz, moved to Kampen in 1608, and became the first Dutch painter to specialise in snow. He left about a hundred paintings, and he also sold drawings, tinted with watercolour, for collectors to paste into albums.

He was not inventing the weather. Avercamp was born into one of the coldest stretches of what we now call the Little Ice Age, and this painting belongs to the winter of 1607 and 1608, when the water froze hard enough to carry a whole town.

Two last things. The museum's own page on this panel tells you to hunt for a man slipping, a bare bottom, and skating couples, so the jokes have official approval. And the winter scenes sold so well that Avercamp painted them in the summer.

A swan at life size, wings up, beak open, coming out of a canvas 171 centimetres wide. It is the loudest thing in the Gallery of Honour. Jan Asselijn painted it around 1650 and signed it with a small monogram at the lower right.

On the face of it nothing complicated is going on. A mute swan is defending its nest from a dog. The dog is the part most people miss: down at the lower left, half in the water, small, almost swimming out of the picture.

Now look for the writing, because somebody turned this bird into a political poster. Low between the swan's legs, in pale letters, are the words de raad-pensionaris, the Grand Pensionary. On the left, above the dog's head, de viand van de staat, the enemy of the state. And on the egg at the right edge, one word: Holland.

Read those three and the painting becomes a cartoon. Johan de Witt was Grand Pensionary of Holland from 1653 to 1672, which made him in practice the head of the Dutch Republic. Here he is the swan, defending the nation from its enemies, and by 1800 that reading was fixed: the sale catalogue of that year already described the picture as an allegory of Grand Pensionary de Witt.

Except Asselijn cannot have meant any of it. He died in 1652, twenty years before the thing that turned de Witt into a martyr. In 1672, the year the Dutch still call the Rampjaar, the Disaster Year, with England and France at war with the Republic at the same time, a mob killed de Witt and his brother Cornelis at the Gevangenpoort prison in The Hague and hung their bodies naked and upside down on the public gibbet. This museum owns a small painting of that scene, attributed to Jan de Baen. It hangs in room 2.18.

The lettering on this swan was added later still. The current view is that it went on in the 1750s, during a pamphlet war fought over de Witt's reputation eighty years after his death. Someone wanted the argument settled and wrote on a painting to settle it.

One more thing, and it is the reason this canvas is in this building at all. The museum records the purchase as the eleventh of June 1800. The dealer Cornelis Sebille Roos bought it for a hundred guilders for the Nationale Konst-Gallery in The Hague, and it is that collection's first documented acquisition. The Vermeers, the Rembrandt at the end of this corridor, the million objects in the stores: all of it came after an angry swan.

The first thing in front of you is not the painting. It is a glass chamber, and people working inside it. This is Operation Night Watch, the largest research and restoration project ever aimed at a single Rembrandt. After five years of investigation the restoration itself has begun, and conservators are lifting the old varnish off the surface with microscopic precision, in public, while you watch.

Now the painting. Three hundred and seventy-nine and a half centimetres high, four hundred and fifty-three and a half wide, thirty-four figures. Rembrandt finished it in 1642 for the great hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters of the arquebusiers, one of the companies of Amsterdam's civic guard, which was the city's militia and its police force. Group portraits of these companies were normally rows of men looking out at you. Rembrandt was the first to paint one in which everybody is doing something. The captain in black with the red sash is Frans Banninck Cocq. The lieutenant in yellow with the white sash is Willem van Ruytenburch. The captain is telling him to start the company marching, and the whole crowd is falling into formation around that single instruction.

Eighteen of the men paid, roughly a hundred guilders each, sixteen hundred in total, and their names were painted onto a shield in the background around 1715. The drummer at the far right did not pay. He was hired for the day, and Rembrandt put him in for nothing.

Two things everybody knows about this picture are wrong. It is not a night scene. The painting spent most of its life under a darkening varnish, which is where the name came from, and that varnish was cleaned off in the 1940s. And it is not the whole painting. In 1715 it was moved to the town hall on the Dam and trimmed on all four sides to fit the wall it was given, between two doors. Two figures on the left went, along with the top of the arch, the balustrade and the edge of a step, and the offcuts are lost. In 2021 the museum rebuilt the missing strips using a small seventeenth-century copy by Gerrit Lundens and a neural network trained on Rembrandt's own brushwork, and showed the complete picture for three months.

It has been attacked three times. In 1911 an unemployed shoemaker went at it with a knife and the hard varnish stopped him. In 1975 an unemployed teacher named Wilhelmus de Rijk cut zig-zag slashes into the canvas with a bread knife, some of them thirty centimetres long. In 1990 a man sprayed acid at it, and again the varnish took the damage. During the Second World War it was rolled around a cylinder and hidden, first in bunkers near the coast from 1939, then from 1942 in a cave inside the Sint-Pietersberg at Maastricht.

Two things to find before you leave. To the left of the captain, in gold, there is a girl with a dead chicken hanging from her belt. The claws are the badge of the clauweniers, the arquebusiers, and the same shape was the company's drinking horn; the museum calls her the mascot. And at the lower right, behind the drummer, there is a dog. Work done during the restoration traced it to an illustration by Adriaen van de Venne, which means Rembrandt copied it from a book.

One last fact, which surprises most people standing in this room. The Rijksmuseum does not own the Night Watch. The credit line reads: on loan from the City of Amsterdam. The city has lent it to the museum since 1808, and on paper it is still Amsterdam's picture, hanging here by arrangement.