Rembrandt showpiece set for ‘live’ makeover
Print Edition
Rembrandt van Rijn’s Golden Age masterpiece The Night Watch is getting a makeover.
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum announced yesterday that it will restore its most famous painting, starting next year in a project that will be open to the public and viewable online.
Rijksmusem General Director Taco Dibbits said that from July the huge Golden Age masterpiece will be encased in a specially built glass chamber as it first undergoes a thorough varnish-to-canvas examination using a precise microscope and other modern techniques. The findings will guide the subsequent restoration. “The restoration techniques we now have are so advanced that we will safeguard the painting for future generations,” he said.
The painting is ready for a little TLC. The work, which last underwent a restoration 40 years ago, is starting to show blanching in parts of the canvas. “We want to understand what that change is so that we can restore it as well as possible,” Dibbits told reporters at a presentation of the planned restoration.
The painting of a citizens’ militia completed in 1642 has suffered in the past.
During the World War II Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, it was hidden along with other valuable artworks in a cave in the southern city of Maastricht. In 1975 a man slashed it with a knife, leaving 12 scars in the canvas, and in 1990 an attacker sprayed acid on the canvas damaging the varnish. It took restorers only a couple of weeks to repair the damage inflicted by the acid.
Dibbits said the painting has been retouched many other times in the past and that the later additions are starting to fade.
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