But anyone who has visited the museum will find it weird. It is very different. The building architecture is very different, there are thousands more works in the exposition, and the order of the works is very different, ...
In the museum, I felt a dialogue between each painting with the surrounding ones. They'd be grouped stylistically, with painters from the same era, on similar themes. It was like a walk where we'd see a continuous. In the computer/site, it is much more discrete, sectioned, and compartmentalized.
I worked at this museum a few decades ago on a contract job, it was cool to walk around among so much history. Though I never really could appreciate the "old masters" from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the "family album". Artfully done yes but boring subjects in my personal opinion.
I did like some of the landscape views though. But overall I'm more into modern art where the art and the message is the only goal.
One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. In contrast, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was disappointingly tiny.
And famous art that's much smaller in person than I expected: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. For such an epic image, it's only 25x37 cm / 10x14".
Japanese woodblock prints were not considered art at the time, they were for the day to day. From advertisment to low cost decoration. Japanese Woodblock prints do not really have an original other than the woodblocks themselves (or the original painting the wood was carved from).
Aside from color and translucency, an original artwork shows also the relief. It can tell much about the creation process of a painting and adds additional texture.
Furthermore, some pigments were expensive and hard to work with prior to the 19th century such that artists used it very sparingly.
This stood out to me the very first time I saw Starry Night at MoMa. The paint is so thickly layered, and you can see the individual brush strokes in stark relief.
It makes me wish for a VR app with ultra HD reproductions, you could have normal maps and other 3d techniques to add another level of fidelity, the scale is also not a problem in VR.
Add to that the Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough at the Pasadena Huntington and anything by Hans Holbein the Younger such as the portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell at the Frick Collection.
The former uses a brilliant blue paint that is simply impossible to convey via RGB display or CMYK printing color spaces and the latter look like giant printed photographs, down to the stubble on More's face, even though they were painted in the early 16th century.
> And so much of the European painting mastery in the 1400s+ is the manipulation of non-opaque paint to create a desired effect.
I'm sad that people don't bother with that as much today. I went on a shopping spree a while ago buying a bunch of Williamsburg and Old Holland oil paints and their colors are absolutely amazing, especially the old school heavy metal paints which come in a variety of opacities. Blending them is an art in its own right. Sadly I don't have any skill at painting so it's mostly abstract experiments with color.
> One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. In contrast, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was disappointingly tiny.
I had the same experience seeing a print of Hokusai’s Great Wave. For whatever reason it was built up in my mind as a huge piece, but in reality it’s the size of a standard sheet of paper.
I agree with you on the subjects are boring rich people, if we judge it with today standards. For the time it was actually quite unique that (upper) middle class people could get their portrait done, and not just nobles.
I like to think of it as part of a period of history where the merchants start to gain power from the aristocracy and that shows in what gets passed down to us.
It reflects a great change in Western society, which really began to flourish first in the Netherlands, where the merchant and industrial classes began to be dominant, and were growing sick of pretending it wasn't true.
Mostly in Britain these days, we see the final pretenses of the nobility on display.
Holland is really where the wealthy merchant class first became dominant in Europe--and was generally not subservient to the nobility as in other other countries.
I remember what I liked about Rijks upon visiting was that it was organized by decade, and had not only paintings, but various historical artifacts as well. Like state corporation sealed opium, which offered a context for the contemporary relaxed attitude of the Dutch towards drug consumption. And in general offered many windows into how the country grew up to be what it is. So yes, much history!
I was walking around the Rijksmuseum just yesterday and had the same thought. Except: Rembrandt’s paintings stood out to me among those of his peers. His subjects didn’t feel posed and his lighting and setpieces felt soft and naturalistic, not artificial. Each canvas gave the impression of an intimate peek into someone’s life. The style almost reminded me of late Romantic paintings (e.g. Peredvizhniki) that came 200 years later.
Recommend Peter Greenaway’s film „J’Accuse” about Rembrandt and that painting. It shares your criticism and argues that in it’s own time, that painting did as well.
For me, it took going to Van Gogh’s museum in Amsterdam to really get it. The way they contextualize and explain his work and the actual lighting of the museum is something to experience first hand.
Something which is very hard, if not impossible, to get unless you look at the real deal.
I'm generally not into art but my mom took me to the Rijksmuseum, and I was blown away by the details in those paintings. I spent probably 15 minutes just studying the translucent ruff in one of the paintings in amazement.
The paint is three dimensional, the light interacts in ways which just aren't captured in a photo. Viewing the paintings on my screen here now they all look flat and quite dull in comparison.
> Though I never really could appreciate the "old masters" from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the "family album". Artfully done yes but boring subjects in my personal opinion.
That's actully what I like about the Night Watch, and how it's displayed. It's in a room with other paintings from the same period in the same genre (group portraits of guilds or militia units), so you can see what Rembrandt's clients were expecting and how the Night Watch is different.
If you want a really interesting version of the work, go to the Royal Delft factory. They made a reproduction in their famous blue tile. It's about the same size as the original.
What I do like about those paintings is the techniques used: relief to give some parts more volume, simple strokes to portray glass or metal reflections, other kind of simple strokes for textiles. As you say, now we have photographs, but it amazes me how what they could do without that technology.
When I visited I think I spent more time looking at the architecture of the building than the collections. It's very nice. Similar story with the Louvre I suppose - I never went in, but enjoyed walking past the pyramid exterior in the evening
Yeah, it's not really fair to associate quality with size but... Thomas Cole's huge works. Most of Rembrandt's famous works are fairly large. Etc. I admit to not being an especial admirer of the Mona Lisa but certainly larger works grab our attention more.
well now most people look at pictures of stuff rich ppl on their phones all day. maybe they were ahead of their time :D. wish there were old masters who made pictures of cats. id visit that museum for sure.
Sounds like you have been to the Rijks and nowhere else. Lots of old paintings of all kinds of scenes hang in lots of museums all over this country. Not a huge museum goer but this lacks nuance.
Oh wow, that is so cool. I thought I was at max zoom, normal blurry tiles. Then BOOM! It came into focus and I saw tiny cracks, smallest areas of paint, no loss of clarity. It's like you're standing right up next to it. That's incredible! Wow, all I can say. That's insane, that is totally insane!
I would love if there were a depthmask or something and a synthetic "keylight" feature you could drag around to really get an idea of the textures, the peaks and valleys. I guess we'll have that in a future version. This is incredible.
I wonder why did they change the lamb's head features, it looks worse (the expression) after the restoration IMO and such a significant alteration is not acceptable IMO.
It actually seems like they restored it to its original style. It was painted over to make the sheep look more sheep-like. The "new" restored version is actually how the Van Eycks painted it.[0]
Despite the ill-advised mandatory account (really, what's up with that?), the Rijksmuseum is providing a better service than the neighbouring Van Goghmuseum, which refuses to share anything but low resolution photos of Vincent van Gogh's works. Public museums are supposed to be custodians of culture, not IP owners.
You can zoom in a lot on the 2490 × 1328 pixels offered. When you hit the download button for the full version, you get nagged.
Edit: you can zoom in, and then it will offer up the painting in slices at a higher resolution. So in theory you could download those and stitch them together if you manage to hit an unscaled version.
the account might be a combination of "deter abusive downloads" and "help, we have not enough members" combined.. now thinking, the result of account gets sent to administration and then funders, too, as a report result. not defending the practice, but the institution has to defend and maintain, too.
Those 100MP digital medium format cameras are the most exciting tech in photography of the whole 21st century as far as I’m concerned.
For my “serious” photography work I shoot medium/large format film, and every digital camera has left me non plussed. I may be a little obsessive about image quality, but what’s the point of dropping $5k on a setup that gives worse results than a wooden box and a sheet of film?
Then I got the Fuji GFX100 (the Hassy was a little out of my range :-) and… wow. Totally different ball game. I can finally produce digital images that rival film scans.
Seeing what museums have been doing with them has been super cool.
There’s a trade off between sharpness and noise, the GFX have an intentionally lowered fill factor to, essentially, produce a sharper image. Meanwhile noise is one of the most important things when marketing mainstream cameras (next to AF), so they go for gapless microlenses etc.
The reason this impacts sharpness is because a lower FF gets you closer to Shannon’s ideal point sample, while a 99% FF is like a pitch-sized box filter.
There is also a tradeoff between sharpness and aliasing, that's a bigger driver for microlenses than just capturing more photons. A point sample is only ideal if your sample resolution is above the nyquist frequency which for the real world it won't be.
Yes, this was nicely highlighted by the GFX50 vs. GFX100. Both are around 50% fill factor and have no OLPF, the GFX50 produces a lot of aliasing artifacts, the GFX100 much less so, because Nyquist moves up some 40%, so diffraction takes more readily care of attenuating these higher spatial frequencies.
I had the fortune of taking Erdmann's Python class at the University of Arizona 15 years ago --- a Python/Pylab/data engineering class aimed at materials science engineering students.
He was already getting into this kind of art spectroscopy at the time, and the things he'd showed us at the time that they'd already discovered were wild. IIRC, they had laid out many Rembrandts on the same large "scroll" of canvas, identified where they were painted relative to one another on the scroll, and even identified some paintings of unclear authorship by thing them to that same scroll.
It was not at all surprising to see him move to Amsterdam and keep working with the Rijksmuseum. I smile every time I see this work pop up.
> an error of even 1/8 mm in the placement of the camera would result in a useless image.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Presumably part of the image stitching process is aligning the images to each other based on the areas they overlap, so why do they need that much precision in the camera placement? I’d think keeping the camera square to the painting would be important to minimize needing to skew the images, but that doesn’t seem to be what they’re talking about.
A camera+lens set up to 5 micron/pixel will have a shallow depth of field.
I looked up some numbers: The pixels of the camera are 4.6um, so the likely used a 1:1 makro lens (likely the HC 4/120mm). You will capture a 53x40mm region at once. The working distance for this lens goes down to 40cm for 1:1 magnification (might have been 40-45cm). Aperture 4 (as little diffraction as possible)
If we put that in a calculator, depth of field is only 240um. This is the working range where the object needs to be to be in focus.
I'm surprised the painting is that flat over a single image. Even a high spot on the canvas or an extra dab of paint will be higher. Maybe they took multiple images and focus stacked them?
It's interesting that while standing in front of the painting, someone would be looking at their phone, and that they would look at a photograph of the painting.
The Rijksmuseum is on my top 5 list of museums I've ever visited, along with the Vatican Museum, the Louvre, the Met and the Uffizzi.
There are a lot more interesting works in there including Vermeer, other Rembrandt works, Pieter DeHooch, Rubens, the whole golden era of Dutch Renaissance...
Since you're in Amsterdam already save some time to visit the VanGogh Museum, very close to Rijksmuseum.
And since you're in Netherlands already save some time to go to Den Hag (the Hague) to visit the Maritius Huis museum and the cool M.C. Escher museum.
The sad reality is that if one is _already_ in Amsterdam, he or she has to spend a week or two more there just to be able to get into the VanGogh Museum.
The map or whatever they use to achieve the online widget is extremely impressive. I’ve never seen such a clean implementation of a progressively loading zoom tool like that before, apart from in map applications and even they often suffer from buffering.
To be honest I don't understand the obsession about documenting things that are done to the painting. Going through that section of the museum I felt like the curators cared more about showcasing their efforts to store the painting than the painting itself.
I think it’s a way of keeping the museum’s single most popular piece of art on display whilst working it. I think most museums would remove it for a while, but so many people come specifically to see this painting that they want to keep it viewable, so they make a little show of its restoration.
I dunno; I’ve been through that floor 5 or 6 times since they started work, and people always seem to love the spectacle of it.
I always find it fascinating! Much like it is important in a museum of natural history to note "science isn't finished, some of these things are still under research" it's important to contextualize the painting you see today.
The painting today is different than it was fifty years ago or a hundred years ago or from the day it was completed.
It's common for paintings to be modified after completion, either by the creator or by the current owner. Whose version are you seeing? What are the possible versions?
Anyway, the best part of a museum is you don't have to look at the things that bore you
I suspect there's selection effects in play: museum curators who don't aggressively make the case for more museum funding, don't end up curating the most well-funded museums.
Why not? It's an old work of art, if you're going to make changes to it you better do the best equivalent of `git commit` that you physically can, to preserve how it was before your change.
Sometimes I find these things more interesting than the painting. I think it's good to also highlight what the museum is working on. Otherwise people would think it's just a room where they hang up new paintings once in a while, the restoring and research part would then be even more invisible.
This particular piece of work is damn near 400 years old. When one is tasked with participating in preserving such an item so the next twenty generations can also enjoy it, it pays to take notes on what you’ve done with your small part of that chain.
Preserving and restoring an oil painting that old and large is a minor achievement, especially considering how many people have tried to destroy the painting in the last hundred years.
> Julian Baumgartner of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, a second generation studio and now the oldest in Chicago employs only the finest archival and reversible materials and techniques to conserve and restore artworks for future generations.
Its really interesting seeing the removal of past restoration attempts and the modern techniques to restore a painting.
If I was to pick two that touch most on the responsibility of restoration and what is and is not achievable...
Scraping, Scraping, Scraping Or A Slow Descent Into Madness. The Conservation of Mathias J. Alten https://youtu.be/YOOQl0hC18U
This is good, but I wish they would allow for more than 1:1 zoom in. 1:1 pixels on a 4k display are too small, I'd like to be able to zoom in more than that.
> To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera.
Looks like they had the ability to move the camera precisely to one of 97x87 grid positions. I wonder if they had any headroom in the precision of that movement. Could they have used a lower resolution but much cheaper camera and compensated by taking, say, a 200x200 grid of images instead?
Lower resolution yes, but one thing with the 400MS or any multishot back is that it can shift by one or 1/2 pixel to collect full RGB color info for each pixel, very important for conservation work.
First time I visited the Rijksmuseum I was of course excited to see the night watch. I found it on a side wall, 20x15 cm and was really surprised. I was expecting something more grandiose.
But never mind, I love paintings from that era so I went on admiring the others.
At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow.
Before getting to the main part of the museum, there were two temporary exhibitions. One was about doll houses and the other was about the activities (work) on a 17th century ship.
The latter was amazing. I was traumatized by the surgeon work, and his 5 tools... 5 tools to handle all injuries - how happy I am too live in France in the 21st century
That's the point - As a sibling comment says - there is a small replica and then suddenly I saw the whole painting at the end of the central corridor. This was a "wow" moment, and an unexpected one
Since it was not clear from my comment: "At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow" was when I discovered the real painting on a whole wall at the end of the central corridor. It was amazing
You saw the small replica Rembrandt made for the dude who commissioned the painting. He wanted one to hang in his home. It’s much smaller than the actual piece, which covers a whole wall.
And indeed, the large one got a chunk cut off at some stage as they had to move it. This was long ago when Rembrandt was not particularly in vogue.
Very vaguely related to image detail but you know what similarly impressed the heck out of me:
you know that first ever imaging of a black hole using telescopes across the globe and even the poles to make the signal gathering as wide as possible?
well that telescope (interferometer) could also image a TENNIS BALL on the MOON
(in perspective currently 5 meters is the best resolution of the moon we have and they only get like one or two photons back when they bounce a laser off that mirror the astronauts left there)
So are we going to enter an era where we can get ten more times out of existing telescopes with exponentially better sensors?
There is fairly significant difference in radio observations and visible spectrum imaging though. You aren't going to get 5m resolution visible light image of the Moon any time soon.
I’ve built a website which will show you a random object from the massive Rijksmuseum collection. Always nice to find something you’ve never seen before!
Fascinating to see how the paint cracked. I zoomed in around the faces of the three men on the bottom right hand side and there are light areas on their faces with few cracks and dark areas with lots of cracks, eg around the noses. I wonder what caused that.
I do not know of course, but black oil painting cracks more than other colours. I think it is common to mix black colour with a bit of dark blue to avoid excessive cracking. That could be a potential explanation.
I worked with several imaging and computer vision people at the rijksmuseum, including authors of this project. This team is actually extremely competent and professional. Usually surprising for governmental institutions, but this one is ace.
The tiled zoom thing is everywhere, and lots of museums publish high resolution images this way. There’s a handy tool to reconstruct an image at any zoom level from a url: https://dezoomify-rs.ophir.dev/
This is a remarkable complement to seeing a work of art in person. We can get close through zoom in ways that we couldn't at the museum without putting the piece at risk.
Shortly after the painting was completed it was cropped so that it would fit on the wall. See if you can guess which edge was the victim.
Of the high resolution image itself... I teach painting and regularly use such images as teaching aids. I honesty belive that they have as much teaching value (or even more) than seeing the real thing. The details of paint applicationare magnificently clear in such images.
Yes, but the left hand low was the largest and (in my opinion) the most noticeable. That being said the trim on the right makes the two right-most figures feel ‘wrong’ and the cropped bottom moves the central figure’s feet way too close to the edge.
The structure of the painting is very common: a central figure surrounded by a semi-circle of figures. For an early and clear example look at The Tribute Money by Masaccio. The crop on the left plays hell with this structure. It also moves the central figure maddeningly close to the middle. Rembrandt would never have voluntarily placed a figure in the middle of a multi-figure composition.
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https://rijkscollection.net/
Highly recommended and easy to fall into a “rijkscollection hole” for a bit :)