Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn.
The masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age is part of the collection of the Amsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best-known painting in its collection.
The Rijksmuseum has been home to The Night Watch since 1885, other than for four years during World War II when it was detached from its frame and rolled around a cylinder. The painting was stored in a special safe built to protect many works of art in the underground caves of Maastricht, Netherlands.
Again, in 2003, the painting spent 10 years in the Philipsvleugel of the Rijksmuseum while the Rijksmuseum underwent restoration. Once the restoration was complete, The Night Watch returned to its original place in the Nachtwachtzaal (Room of the Night Watch).
Use of technology in sharing Rembrandt’s work
The earliest use of new technology took place in October 2011 when the museum installed sustainable LED lighting for The Night Watch. It turned out to be the first time LED lighting has been able to render the fine nuances of the painting’s complex color palette.
The biggest takeaway, besides a color temperature of 3,200 Kelvin, similar to warm-white light sources like tungsten halogen, and the fact that the museum saved 80 percent on the electric bill was the painting was given a safer environment because of the absence of UV radiation and heat.
The latest restoration effort will make use of the latest in modern technology, including a millimeter-by-millimeter scanning process, which, by the way, is expected to take about 70 days, as well as additional imaging techniques, including high-resolution photography and computer analysis.
All this pre-restoration work will give experts a detailed picture of the painting, from the varnish to the canvas itself. It is only then that the team will make a plan, determining precisely how to proceed with the restoration.
What is really interesting, and exciting for art-lovers, is the museum will work on the painting while it is encased in a “state-of-the-art clear glass chamber” on the museum floor, according to the BBC. The ultra white (very clear glass) chamber, is 7-metres square (22 square feet) and is designed by the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte.
The painting itself is huge, one of the distinguishing features of the work, being 363 centimeters x 437 centimeters (11.91 feet x 14.34 feet), and weighs a whopping 337 kilograms (743 pounds).
Why the restoration will live-streamedmed
Museum director Taco Dibbits said, “The Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings in the world. It belongs to us all. That is why we have decided to conduct the restoration within the museum itself – and everyone, wherever they are, will be able to follow the process online.”
Dibbits acknowledges the restoration will take quite a number of years, and cost a great deal of money, too. And before any work begins in July 2019, The Night Watch will be the centerpiece of an exhibition marking 350 years since Rembrandt van Rijn’s death.
The painting has a special place in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour, which was built especially for the painting and where it sits on what Dibbits calls a “high altar”, visited by more than 2 million people a year. But curators have noticed a deterioration in the painting, which was last restored in 1975, following a knife attack by a Dutch teacher.
“We continuously monitor the painting and noticed that the restoration of the 1970s had started to discolor,” said Dibbits. “There’s a whiteish haze which appears on it, so you can’t quite appreciate it in its full glory.”
One very evident patch on the painting is the “blanched figure of a dog on the lower right of the painting,” he said. “Because it’s such an amazingly important painting and so many people want to see it, we feel we have to keep showing it to the public even as we’re restoring it.”
Dibbits, who is 50, remembers seeing the masterpiece for the first time as a seven-year-old during its last restoration. “It was hugely exciting to see. Like every conservation, on the one hand, it’s very scientific, on the other it’s very mysterious. It inspired my curiosity in the creative process, in how a work of art is born.”
But because restorations in the past have remained hidden behind curtains, Dibbits wants the world to see and take part in the process. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the public,” Dibbits said, “not least because the materials we have now for preservation are so much better and more advanced than in the past, that it’s unlikely to happen again for the next few generations.”
