Since the 19th century, the trimmed painting has been housed in the Rijksmuseum, where it is displayed as the museum’s centerpiece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Honor.
About two feet from the left of the canvas was shaved off, and another nine inches from the top.
Temporarily restoring these parts will give visitors a glimpse of what had been lost: three figures on the left-hand side and, more important, a feel for Rembrandt’s meticulous construction in the work’s composition.
Rather than hiring a painter to reconstruct the missing pieces, the museum’s senior scientist, Robert Erdmann, trained a computer to recreate them pixel by pixel in Rembrandt’s style.
Indications already existed of how the original “Night Watch” likely looked, thanks to a copy made by Gerrit Lundens, another 17th-century Dutch painter.
Lundens’ composition is also much looser, with the figures spread out more haphazardly across the canvas, so it could not be used to make a one-to-one reconstruction.
Those scans provided Erdmann with precise information about the details and colors in Rembrandt’s original, which the algorithms used to recreate the missing sections using Lundens’s copy as a guide.
The original was asymmetrical: The large arch that stands behind the crowd was in the middle, and the group’s leaders were on the right.
Once the new pieces were restored, so was the balance, Dibbits said.
Looking at the group of militia men standing just over Banninck Cocq’s shoulder, it is possible to see the top of someone’s head — a hat, a nose and an eye, looking out at the viewer.