This civic guard piece was the second executed by Jacob Backer. His earlier portrait in this genre was dated 1638 and adorned the vestibule of the Kloveniersdoelen (the headquarters of the arquebusiers’ civic guard), but is now, unfortunately, lost.8 The present picture was also commissioned for that building, as one of three completed in 1642 for the long wall opposite the windows in the Great Hall, where it hung next to the entrance. The other two works were Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy’s portrait of the guardsmen of district IV, which had pride of place in the centre, and to the left of it Rembrandt’s Night Watch (fig. a).9 This side of the room originally had six small windows, each flanked by pilasters. The windows had to be bricked up and the wall made flat in order to accommodate the paintings.10 The three canvases were the largest civic guard pieces ever executed, and were probably the largest paintings in Amsterdam at the time. While a few of the group portraits made earlier for the other two civic guard headquarters were wider, these were a metre or more taller than their nearest competitors. In their present states Pickenoy’s is the widest at 527 centimetres and Backer’s the highest at 367 centimetres. Seventeenth-century reduced copies of Rembrandt’s and Backer’s pictures indicate that the prototypes were cut down on all sides. The greatest loss occurred to the left of The Night Watch, while the Backer was cropped the most on the right, where an entire figure at the top was removed (fig. b).11 Martin, who published the copy after Backer’s painting in 1933, calculated the size of the original to have been 379 by 549 centimetres.12 Based on the widths of the three individual pieces of canvas that make up the support of Backer’s picture and seventeenth-century standardized loom width, Colenbrander has more recently suggested that it would have been originally 418 centimetres high.13 By dividing the total length of the long wall (1,736 centimetres) minus the estimated room taken up by pilasters which may or may not have existed (121.5 centimetres) by three, Colenbrander estimated the widths of the three portraits that adorned it to have been 537.8 centimetres.14 However, only X-radiography can provide a factual basis for determining the work’s original dimensions. Unlike Rembrandt in The Night Watch, Backer took his painting’s corner location in the Great Hall into consideration by placing some of the guardsmen on a flight of steps. Inspired by Joachim von Sandrart’s 1640 civic guard piece in the same room,15 this motif closes the composition on the right and takes advantage of the height of the canvas as comparison with Pickenoy’s portrait demonstrates, where the majority of the men constitute a frieze at the bottom. The diagonal created by the staircase and those formed by the pikes, muskets and other weapons, as well as the company’s banner, impart a sense of dynamism, leading the eye to the far left of the picture where Captain Cornelis de Graeff is seated. By putting the most important sitter here, De Graeff was as close as possible to the centre of the Great Hall.16 Some authors have suggested that the structures on the left were arranged on a diagonal so that they would link up with the ones in Pickenoy’s canvas.17 However, the porch in front of the building in Backer’s painting makes it unlikely that the structure was intended as the side wall of the house in Pickenoy’s work. Rather, the sole function of the non-descript architecture on the left of Backer’s portrait is the creation of depth. The numerous pikes on the right of the composition and the two guardsmen next to them seen from behind, also contribute to the sense of recession. As is the case with the pikes, the bearers of the two muskets being fired to the left of centre are not in view. Their presence here, and that of the two musketeers depicted more or less in the middle, serve to emphasize the fact that the musket was the privileged weapon of the arquebusiers. According to Haverkamp-Begemann the still life of armour at the lower right symbolizes the civic guard’s role as protector of Amsterdam’s citizens.18 Jan van Dyk, the supervisor of the city’s art collection, states in his 1758 catalogue of the works in the Town Hall that the sitters in three of the six Kloveniersdoelen civic guard pieces – which by this time had all been transferred to Dam square – were identified above or below the paintings,19 presumably on wooden boards, although Van Dyk does not explicitly say so. The one attached to Bartholomeus van der Helst’s portrait 20 has alone survived and dates to around 1715, when the picture had been relocated to the Grote Krijgsraadkamer (Great Council of War Chamber) in the Town Hall. The other two civic guard pieces that were given such shields were Backer’s and Pickenoy’s. In his discussion of the latter, Van Dyk specifies that it had been placed above the work when still in the Kloveniersdoelen.21 Pickenoy’s canvas was most ../..