The square began as a hole in the city walls. The Regulierspoort guarded one of the main gateways into medieval Amsterdam, and by 1655, when the city had stretched out far past the old defences, the spot just inside the gate started filling with farmers. Butter and milk and eggs were a perishable trade in the seventeenth century. You wanted to sell quickly, near the city centre, near a weigh house that could certify your goods. By 1668 the Regulierspoort had been retrofitted into the Waaggebouw, a public weigh house. In autumn, the farmers gave way to fairs, with dance orchestras and circus tents in the same space they had been arranging churns the week before. The market kept this rhythm for two hundred years before the Rembrandt statue arrived and the name changed.

Louis Royer cast the figure in 1852, in one piece, in iron. It is the oldest statue still standing in any public space in Amsterdam. Rembrandt wears the wide hat that he gave himself in his middle-period self-portraits, the painter looking out from under the brim with the half-amused expression of a man being watched. The plinth carries a reproduction of his signature. By the early 20th century, the square around him had become a centre of Amsterdam nightlife: cafes, hotels, music halls, eventually neon. Rembrandt himself died poor in 1669 in a rented house, after his masterpiece The Night Watch had failed to make him solvent. The statue has the comfortable bronze permanence of a man who, three centuries later, finally won the argument about whether his work was worth anything.

In 2006 the Netherlands celebrated Rembrandt's 400th birthday, and as part of the festivities Russian sculptors Mikhail Dronov and Alexander Taratynov made a bronze, three-dimensional version of The Night Watch: twenty-two life-sized figures from the painting, captain and lieutenant and drummer and dog, arranged on the plaza around the seated statue. The figures travelled to New York and Moscow and Oranienbaum after the original three-year display ended. In 2012 they came back to the redesigned square, the result of a 3.5-million-euro renovation completed in 2009. For nearly a decade the bronze militiamen drew crowds; tourists posed between them, slipping into the painting. Negotiations broke down in 2020. The artists wanted to sell for one and a half million euros; the local business association had been paying 75,000 euros a year to rent. On 12 February 2020 the figures were removed. The square felt different the next morning.

Tram lines 4, 9 and 14 still rattle along the north side of the square, threading toward Centraal Station in one direction and the Stopera, across the Blauwbrug on the Amstel, in the other. Most of the buildings on the south side are bars and clubs. On a Friday night in summer the plein is loud past midnight, fountains running, terrace tables full, hen parties dressed in pink walking past stag parties dressed in something else. By the early hours the trams slow to occasional. By dawn the cleaners are out. Rembrandt sits in the middle of it, the same cast-iron Rembrandt as in 1852, looking thoughtful in the way only a public statue can. The market is long gone. The painter who lived a few blocks east has outlasted the city walls, the weigh house, the LCD screen that briefly tried to live here, and now his own bronze militiamen. The square keeps his name.