One of Rembrandt’s finest work ‘The Night Watch’ from 1642, is a prime representation of Dutch Golden Age painting. But the painting was greatly disfigured after the artist’s death, when it was moved from its original location at the Arquebusiers Guild Hall to Amsterdam’s City Hall in 1715.
In 1715, the work was to be transported for display to Amsterdam’s Town Hall, and was cropped on all four sides to fit between the building’s narrow columns, removing two characters on the left side, and architectural features in the composition. The painting was trimmed two feet from the left side, nine inches from the top, 12 cm from the bottom, and seven cm from the right. The fragments were lost after removal.
With the power of A.I., experts have now reconstructed the missing sections of the work. The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has owned. Restoring The Night Watch to its original size was not included in the plan. The eminent Rembrandt scholar Erst van der Wetering suggested it in a letter to the museum, noting that the composition would change dramatically. The museum tapped its senior scientist, Rob Erdmann, to head the effort using three primary tools: the remaining preserved section of the original painting, a 17th-century copy of the original painting attributed to Gerrit Lundens that had been made before the cuts, and AI technology.
AI was used to solve a set of specific problems. The first was that the copy made by Lundens is one-fifth the size of the original, which measures almost 12 feet in length. The other issue was that Lundens painted in a different style than Rembrandt, which raised the question of how the missing pieces could be restored to an approximation of how Rembrandt would have painted them. Erdmann created three separate neural networks, a type of machine learning technology that trains computers to learn how to do specific tasks to address the problems.
The AI’s reproduction was printed onto canvas and lightly varnished, and then the reproduced panels were attached to the frame of The Night Watch over top the fragmented original. The reconstructed panels do not touch Rembrandt’s original painting and will be taken down in three months out of respect for the Old Master. “It already felt to me like it was quite bold to put these computer reconstructions next to Rembrandt,” Erdmann said.
The reconstructed painting went on view at the Rijksmuseum and will remain till September.