From around 1650 until his death in 1669 Rembrandt painted in a new and distinctive manner. He had experimented with visible, rough, brushwork before, but in the last two decades of his life Rembrandt built up paint on the surface of his canvases such that it came to assume a radical prominence. Rembrandt's late paintings shift in narrative tone, too. In place of dramatic figural groupings ranged dynamically in space is a new, quiet introspection and close-up focus.

Scholars have puzzled over why Rembrandt insisted on pursuing such a style, especially given how unfashionable it was at a time when the clear, bright lucidity of the classical style, grounded ultimately in Raphael, was becoming de rigueur in Dutch painting. Understanding why an artist changes style is never a precise science, but this should not prevent us from drawing inferences from what is available. According to Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt's late style resulted from a crisis. For Van de Wetering this was not the crisis of the Romantic Rembrandt, struggling heroically against tides of misunderstanding, but a crisis of more narrowly defined artistic concerns.

Van de Wetering considers the painting of The Nightwatch as a key transitional moment in this process (Fig. 51). With The Nightwatch, Rembrandt famously took the static tradition of group portraiture and pushed it in the direction of history painting. The members of the militia company do not stand still and pose for a portrait.