One of Rembrandt’s finest works, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq from 1642, is a prime representation of Dutch Golden Age painting.
The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has owned The Night Watch since it opened in 1885 and considers it one of the best-known paintings in its collection.
In the beginning, restoring The Night Watch to its original size hadn’t been considered until the eminent Rembrandt scholar Erst van der Wetering suggested it in a letter to the museum, noting that the composition would change dramatically.
About the decision to use AI to reconstruct the missing pieces instead of commissioning an artist to repaint the work, Erdmann told ARTnews, “There’s nothing wrong with having an artist recreate by looking at the small copy, but then we’d see the hand of the artist there.
AI was used to solve a set of specific problems, the first of which was that the copy made by Lundens is one-fifth the size of the original, which measures almost 12 feet in length.
Erdmann made a test for the neural network, similar to flashcards, by splitting up the painting into thousands of tiles and placing matching tiles from both the original and the copy side-by-side.
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.
As for the original painting by Rembrandt, it may receive conservation treatment depending on the conclusions of the research being conducted as part of Operation Night Watch.