We can only see half of the drummer Jacob Jorisz in The Night Watch, but he still makes quite an impression: he’s standing right at the front, brightly lit, beating his drum with a passion. And now we can see even more of the drummer, or ‘tambour’, thanks to the temporary reconstruction of the outer strips trimmed from The Night Watch in the 18th century. Who was the tambour Jacob Jorisz, and what do we know about him?

Unconventional

It is unusual for a tambour to appear in a militia portrait, because they were only hired in for particular events and weren’t members of the militia. Rembrandt’s inclusion of this tambour is just one of the artistic freedoms he permitted himself in his unique contribution to the long-standing and venerated genre of the militia portrait.

Fantasy costume

The artist went even further by dressing the tambour in a 16th-century-style fantasy costume comprising a beret of thick green fabric and a glossy silk doublet with slits revealing a yellow lining. It was by adding accents of this kind that Rembrandt lent a sense of timelessness to the scene.

Jacob Jorisz

The drummer was a real person, named Jacob Jorisz. He was born in 1591 and is known to have died after 1646. Jorisz was a man of modest means: with his meagre annual income of 40 guilders, appearing in a Rembrandt portrait, which would have cost at least 100 guilders, would normally have been well beyond his reach. But there Jacob Jorisz stands, more prominently even than many of the militiamen. It was his good fortune that Rembrandt understood the dramatic potential of having a tambour thunderously beating his drum.