Banquet at the Crossbowmen’s Guild in Celebration of the Treaty of Münster

Members of Amsterdam’s Crossbowmen’s Guild raise their glasses around a laden table beneath a chandelier, celebrating the treaty that ended the Eighty Years’ War in 1648. Bartholomeus van der Helst painted this immense group portrait to commemorate the Peace of Münster, and contemporaries ranked it beside Rembrandt’s Night Watch as the finest civic portrait of the age. Still hanging in the Amsterdam town hall two centuries later, it remained a standard by which Dutch group portraiture was judged, praised for the brilliance of its silks and the lifelike ease of its figures.