I've had a single art class in my life, and it was Art Appreciation when I was in either the 7th or 8th grade. I always avoided art classes because I was leery of anyone teaching me how to draw or paint. I didn't want anyone to have any influence over what I did. (I was always "the artist" in school.) That particular class, though, satisfied a class requirement and, in retrospect, was extremely educational to me, especially regarding art history. I remember the textbook for that class being especially good for a school textbook at the time and filled with great color pictures. The Nightwatch by Rembrandt is one of the classics that everyone studies. Most of the time, it's really impossible to look at a book and realize the scale of a painting. The dimensions are in the margin of course, but it's just not the same. In the picture below you can see a group of lucky European schoolchildren who get to study the classics in person instead of from a textbook. Here, they're in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh museum is short walk next door. When I first saw The Nightwatch in person it was large enough to surprise me. I had just not envisioned it so large. Then again, the Mona Lisa in The Louvre surprises a lot of people in regards to how small it is. However, I would categorize The Nightwatch as "large" but not "huge" and by European museum standards and there would also have to categories of "gigantic" and "super gigantic", or more refined European-sounding word variations thereof.
This image was recently licensed by a magazine in the Netherlands and has been licensed before for textbook use as well. It's odd to me that I have photographed a painting that I once studied in school and now my picture appears in other students' textbooks, but at least they will now have a sense of scale.
School children visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam viewing The Nightwatch by Rembrandt van Rijn.
P.S. The next time I'll have to ask the museum if I could photograph it at night with the moon shining through the skylight. That would be freaky wouldn't it?
