Rembrandt’s The NightWatch: The Biggest Art Restoration Project of All Time

 by Sam Lewis

'The NightWatch' is one of the world’s most well-known works of art. Painted by Rembrandt in 1642, it is now currently being held in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where it is being restored, and where I was lucky enough to see it in 2019.

The picture has had a long and complex history, with many of the problems it has faced across its 400 year history being a result of neglect and carelessness. One example of such carelessness was when the painting was trimmed in 1715. Because of the painting's huge size, it was not able to fit in most rooms, so to squeeze it into Amsterdam’s Town Hall just over a metre of it was trimmed off. On top of this, years of dark varnish had gathered on the paint’s surface, which was what gave the painting its name, (its original name being ‘The Militia Company of District II’) as it was so dark due to the varnish that people thought it depicted a night scene. Finally, multiple vandalisation attempts, notably in 1975 and 1990, had been committed because of the painting’s fame and status. Therefore, the painting, having suffered both from getting too much attention and too little, was due for restoration.

‘Operation Nightwatch’ started in 2019, a multi million euro project looking to preserve the painting both physically and digitally. First, the surface layers of varnish and other substances were carefully removed so that the Rijksmuseum team could then scan the entire work with a camera, mapping the painting "layer by layer and pigment by pigment" so that they could see what needed to be focused on more. Further restoration in the fine details and grooves of the painting was then done so that another photo could be taken, this time a humongous 44.8 gigapixels, for digital conservation. This photo was so detailed that you could see the texture of the paint and the individual brush strokes when zoomed in. Finally, the Rijksmuseum Team took on the most daunting challenge yet: restoring the lost edges.

By employing new restoration methods, all 102 centimetres of lost painting was able to be recovered. Using Dutch painter Gerrit Lunden’s 17th-century replica of the painting, the team determined a rough estimate of what the edges looked like. Having been created around 12 years after Rembrandt completed the original, the replica would have been an accurate representation of the initial work’s state, however it was a fifth of the size of the original and was painted nowhere near as meticulously. This is why the experts decided to try and replicate the original using AI.

Using the same scanners as earlier, alongside X-rays and an array of 528 digital exposures to recreate and print the missing portions of the canvas. According to the museums director, Taco Dibbits, they “made an incredibly detailed photo of the Night Watch and through artificial intelligence, or what they call a neural network, taught the computer what color Rembrandt used in the NightWatch, which colors and what his brush strokes looked like”

Having gathered all the details of The Nightwatch, the team could use the AI to apply the techniques it observed in Rembrandt’s work onto the replica to get a more accurate recreation. However, the original strips from the painting have still not been found. We can only hope that they are found one day, as it would be strange to throw away such an amount of the painting, especially of an artist so prestigious, but for the moment, we can only admire the incredible efforts of the Rijksmuseum restoration team.