Highly recommended and easy to fall into a “rijkscollection hole” for a bit :)
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, ...
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.
Famous art that's stunningly bigger in person than I expected:
- The Raft of the Medusa (Géricault)
- Guernica (Picasso)
- The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí)
Aside from the scale, it's also impossible to fully capture color or translucency in screen/page-presented imaging.
And so much of the European painting mastery in the 1400s+ is the manipulation of non-opaque paint to create a desired effect.
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.
Besides the Night Watch, this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_De_Staal...
known in English by various names, such as Syndics of the Drapers' Guild. These portrayals are anything but stuffy.
One writer said, if you take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, for music, Rembrandt was more than that for painting.
So what I said is my opinion alone :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=nachtwacht&p=...
To avoid the dumb mandatory account login, just use https://bugmenot.com/view/rijksmuseum.nl . It worked just now (so be nice and leave it working).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I got to watch them do some of the scanning when I walked through the museum on a trip a couple years ago. Very cool setup.
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.
I also highly recommend going to Rembrandt’s house/studio in Amsterdam.
Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online (125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151934
Ultra High Resolution Photo of Night Watch (2022) (40 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778166
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.
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
> 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
Restoring The Faceless Painting https://youtu.be/hsTkaSbMLHw https://youtu.be/rDVcgpSwnyg https://youtu.be/JWCBNL-iu5s
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?
I assume there are software tools for that.
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
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.
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?
"The Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocq" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlSARPr9Y0
Funny coincidence - only this morning I watched a documentary about how they used machine learning to reconstruct the destroyed parts of the painting.
You never know if, 400 years later, people are going to invent a way to examine it atom by atom.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch?...
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.
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.
Much faster than most of these types of sites.
No thanks
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