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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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https://rijkscollection.net/
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:
Cannot recommend seeing art in person enough.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.
Dead Comment
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE
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.
Dead Comment