Rembrandt's painting The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (also known as The Sampling Officials of the Drapers' Guild) was painted in 1662. This very large painting (75 1/4" x 109 3/4") hangs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and is considered one of the great works of Rembrandt's later career. The Syndics is an example of a particular type of group portrait, the board of directors, and is one of the outstanding works of this type. In this portrait, as in many others, Rembrandt conformed to the rules for the genre but his approach was completely individual and his work stands out from all the others of the same type. Aside from being a beautiful, dynamic version of what could be a very boring subject, the Syndics painting also tells the viewer a great deal about Dutch culture at the time.
Portraits were a very popular form of art with the wealthy Dutch citizens of the seventeenth century. Paintings of individuals or couples were very common and group portraits of several kinds were popular. Group portraits were usually of families or one of three official types: civic guards (citizen militias that protected the towns); anatomy lessons, in which a doctor performed the public anatomy lesson and was shown surrounded by other members of the Surgeons' Guild; or Regents paintings which pictured "the governing officials of charitable institutions, guilds, and similar organizations" (Haak, Golden Age 108). Paintings of this third type were "exceedingly popular" beginning in the late sixteenth century and were still common in Amsterdam into the twentieth century (Haak, Golden Age 111). The people shown in the Regents paintings were citizens who were performing a civic duty of some kind.
The good citizens in Rembrandt's Syndics painting were members of a Board whose job it was to inspect (or sample) the quality of the cloth that was made in Amsterdam. This painting was to be hung in their headquarters in "a large complex of building...