For 300 years, viewers had only a partial view of Rembrandt’s 17th-century masterpiece “The Night Watch.” Now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers at the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands have reconstructed the missing sections of the painting, offering a rare glimpse of how it appeared when the Golden Age Dutch artist completed it in 1642.
Rembrandt was commissioned in 1639 to create the work for a new banqueting hall at the headquarters of the Kloveniers, Amsterdam’s civic militia guards, or musketeers. The painting was one of seven militia portraits, or schuttersstukken, commissioned by Captain Banninck Cocq and 17 members of his militia. In 1715, “The Night Watch” was moved to what was then Amsterdam’s City Hall, now the Royal Palace on Dam Square, but the vast canvas proved too large for the space and was cut down on all four sides, with the largest section removed from the left. Art historians say the trimming was done to fit the painting between two columns, a common practice at the time. The removed pieces have never been recovered.
“The fate of the missing pieces of ‘The Night Watch’ remains a great mystery,” said Pieter Roelofs, head of the paintings and sculptures department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Each generation has used the tools available to it to attempt to reconstruct the painting. Now we are doing the same, using the most advanced techniques currently available.”
In 2019, the Rijksmuseum launched “Operation Night Watch” to investigate the painting’s original composition. Using a copy of the original believed to have been painted by Dutch artist Gerrit Lundens between 1642 and 1655, museum researchers trained a computer on Rembrandt’s technique and use of color. The system then used “artificial neural networks” to recreate the missing passages in Rembrandt’s style. The resulting panels were printed and temporarily installed around the original painting, which is now on display at the museum and on its website. Conservation work will not begin until researchers complete their study of how the added panels affect the work’s composition, and the museum does not plan to incorporate the lost sections into the actual restoration of “The Night Watch.”
According to the museum, the project is the largest and most wide-ranging research effort ever undertaken into Rembrandt’s masterpiece. “This project testifies to the key importance of science and modern techniques in the research being conducted into ‘The Night Watch,’” said Robert Erdmann, a senior scientist at the Rijksmuseum. “It is thanks to artificial intelligence that we can so closely simulate the original painting and the impression it would have made.”
The reconstruction also highlights two additional figures on the left side of the painting: a militiaman and a young boy. Captain Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch are now shown slightly to the right of center rather than in the middle of the canvas. The “powder boy” in the left foreground is also seen holding onto a balustrade, and with more space in front of him, he now appears to be running ahead of the militia, according to the researchers. On the far right, the helmet worn by the militiaman is now complete. More space at the top of the composition also makes the motion of raising the militia’s flag “more convincing,” the researchers say.
“‘The Night Watch’ as it is displayed in the Rijksmuseum is etched into our collective memory,” said Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum. “Thanks to this reconstruction, we can now see that the composition as it was painted by Rembrandt was even more dynamic. It is wonderful to be able to now see with our own eyes ‘The Night Watch’ as Rembrandt intended it to be seen.”
