Rembrandt's large painting (363 by 437 centimetres (12 by 14+1⁄2 feet)) is famed for transforming a group portrait of a civic guard company into a compelling drama energized by light and shadow (tenebrism).

Even though she was escaping from her exile from France ordered by her son Louis XIII, the queen's arrival was met with great pageantry.

[citation needed] It is thought the painting was completed in a lean-to in Rembrandt's garden as it is too large to fit into his Amsterdam studio.

This alteration resulted in the loss of two characters on the left side of the painting, the top of the arch, the balustrade, and the edge of the step.

[6][7] A 17th-century copy of the painting by Gerrit Lundens (1622–1683), on loan from the National Gallery, London, to the Rijksmuseum,[8] shows the original composition.

[9] When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, the Town Hall became the Palace on the Dam and the magistrates moved the painting to the Trippenhuis of the family Trip.

The rolled painting was stored for four years in a special safe that was built to protect many works of art in the caves of Maastricht, Netherlands.

[citation needed] On 11 December 2003, The Night Watch was moved to a temporary location, due to a major refurbishment of the Rijksmuseum.

In 2021, the painting was exhibited from June to September with the trimmed-off sections recreated using convolutional neural networks, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, based on the copy by Lundens.

[11] The recreation corrected for perspective (Lundens must have been sitting on the left side of the painting when he made his copy), and used colors and brush-strokes as used by Rembrandt.

[6][12] For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish, which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name by which it is now commonly known.

[16] On 14 September 1975, the work was attacked with a bread knife by an unemployed school teacher, Wilhelmus de Rijk, resulting in several large zig-zagged slashes up to 30 cm long.

Using the new LED lighting, the museum saves 80% on energy and offers the painting a safer environment because of the absence of UV radiation and heat.