The Voetboogdoelen - the name means crossbowmen's shooting range - was founded in 1458, with the surviving building dating from the early 16th century. It was one of three doelens of the Amsterdam schutterij, the civic guard charged with defending the city. The other two were the Handboogdoelen, where the longbow company drilled, and the Kloveniersdoelen, where the arquebusiers practised with their early muskets. Of those three buildings only the Handboogdoelen survives. The Voetboogdoelen was also called the Sint-Jorisdoelen after its patron saint, George, who fought the dragon. The shooting range stretched from the Singel canal all the way back to the rear gardens of houses on the Kalverstraat. Around 1580, William of Orange folded the medieval guild into a larger civic militia to defend the newly Protestant city against the Spanish, and the men recruited into the officer corps were drawn from the wealthiest families of Amsterdam.

In 1648 the Eighty Years' War ended, the Spanish acknowledged Dutch independence, and the civic guard - which had drilled, marched, and stood watch for three generations - lost its reason to exist. The guard did not disband. Membership simply became honorary, and the doelens turned into clubhouses. The wealthiest, most powerful men in Amsterdam came together in these halls to eat, drink, smoke pipes, and commission group portraits. In 1650 the city gave them permission to build houses on the former shooting range. Two new streets opened: the Voetboogstraat and the Handboogstraat, both still on the map today. The men in the Van der Helst painting are not soldiers but former soldiers, dressed in finery, marking with food and ceremony the moment when their generation's war finally ended.

Frans Hals was commissioned in 1633 to paint a group portrait of the Voetboogdoelen guard, the work now known as The Meagre Company. Hals lived in Haarlem and never enjoyed travelling to Amsterdam. By 1636 the painting was still unfinished. The Voetboogdoelen ran out of patience and contracted Pieter Codde to complete it. The two hands - Hals's bravura brushwork in the heads, Codde's finer line in the bodies - can be seen even today in the canvas, which hangs at the Rijksmuseum. Vincent van Gogh studied it in October 1885 and wrote about it to his brother Theo, describing how the painting had shaped his ideas about portraiture. The earlier Voetboogdoelen commissions had set the template that Hals, Rembrandt (with the Night Watch, painted for the Kloveniersdoelen in 1642), and finally Van der Helst would all push to its limit. The schuttersstukken - civic guard portraits - became one of the defining genres of Dutch Golden Age art.

From 1674, the now-unused Voetboogdoelen was rented out to the Dutch West India Company - the second, post-bankruptcy version of the company - and became its headquarters. The Society of Suriname used the building from 1683 until nationalisation in 1795. During the French period under Napoleon it served as barracks. In 1816 the building was demolished to make way for the Roman Catholic St. Catherine's Church, consecrated in 1820. In 1939 that church was itself demolished. The ground stayed empty into the 1960s, when the main building of the Amsterdam University Library was constructed on the spot. Designed by Jan Leupen and others, it has been called by Dutch newspapers one of the ugliest buildings in Amsterdam. The Voetboogdoelen is gone, the church is gone, and what remains is a piece of late-modernist concrete that few people defend - on a site that gave rise to the greatest single peace painting of the Dutch Golden Age.

Stand in the Rijksmuseum's gallery before the Van der Helst painting and you can read the moment frame by frame. Two officers in the foreground shake hands; the senior captain raises a drinking horn. The men's clothes are heavy with embroidery and lace, their cheeks already flushed. Through a window at the back of the painted hall, you can see houses on the opposite side of the Singel canal, including a building at Singel 460 designed by Philip Vingboons that is today the Odeon nightclub and restaurant. The canvas was probably trimmed at some point - a 1779 print by Jacob Cats shows it with much higher walls and visible ceiling. From around 1683, group portraits started leaving the doelens, beginning with the Voetboogdoelen's. Most went to Amsterdam's city hall on Dam Square, now the Royal Palace. Some were cropped to fit their new homes. Rembrandt's Night Watch was trimmed on multiple sides; Cornelis Ketel's 1588 portrait for the Voetboogdoelen lost as much as 1.27 metres on the right. The paintings survived. The hall did not.