Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

[besttof]

A colleague of mine made this very nice way to explore the (often) high resolution images from their collection:

https://rijkscollection.net/

Highly recommended and easy to fall into a “rijkscollection hole” for a bit :)

[UberFly]

This is really nice to use. Is this how this wing of the gallery actually looks?

[GrumpyNl]

Works better than the one mentioned in the title, this one let you zoom in and out with scroll weel.

[diego_moita]

Technically it is an interesting project.

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, ...

[drng]

This is super cool. Thanks for sharing the link

[wkat4242]

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.

[ethbr1]

> 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.

Famous art that's stunningly bigger in person than I expected:

   - The Raft of the Medusa (Géricault)
   - Guernica (Picasso)
   - The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí)

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.

[JJMcJ]

Rembrandt could put life into rich people's portraits in ways few were ever able to match.

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.

[gyomu]

> 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.

[jimvdv]

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.

[cezart]

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!

[archagon]

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.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

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.

[dclowd9901]

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.

[kwanbix]

What is so incredible is the technique they used, the level of detail and how lifelike they are.

[Ichthypresbyter]

> 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.

[devilbunny]

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.

[mmustapic]

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.

[didntcheck]

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

[ErigmolCt]

Art’s impact often depends on context

[ghaff]

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.

[sim7c00]

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.

[timwaagh]

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.

[keepamovin]

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.

[jonasdegendt]

Another similar scan is the Ghent altarpiece[0], and you get to compare the pieces before and after a restoration.

[0] https://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home

[bitexploder]

Enhance, but actually :)

[Guillaume86]

Would love a VR version with the features you mentionned, looking at details with my nose on it...

[tigerlily]

Yeah I noticed this too, incredible, I was thinking "how did they do this?". It's zoom like it should be.

[Freak_NL]

An older, lower resolution image (11206 × 9320 pixels) can be downloaded here:

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.

[gyomu]

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.

[cyberlimerence]

For anyone interested in technical aspects of this, I recommend watching Pycon talk [1] from Robert Erdmann. I bookmarked this couple of years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE

[gunsch]

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.

[encomiast]

Watching that seriously intensifies my imposter syndrome.

[ssfrr]

> 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.

[mrs6969]

I am literally standing in the museum, looking at night watch as this moment, and saw this post. Legend.

[diego_moita]

The Rijksmuseum is on my top 5 list of museums I've ever visited, along with the Vatican Museum, the Louvre, the Met and the Uffizzi.

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.

[generj]

I loved the M.C. Escher museum. The art-deco decor of the building is on display nearly as much as Escher’s work.

I also highly recommend going to Rembrandt’s house/studio in Amsterdam.

[Aachen]

Not sure if off topic, but this German TV ad did a creative recreation of the painting that I found amusing as a Dutch person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6XQXhr7LQM

[JohnKemeny]

Related:

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

[charles_f]

There's something oddly satisfying in that you keep zooming in impressively close, and the image remains clean and non blurry.

[curiousgal]

To be honest I don't understand the obsession about documenting things that are done to the painting. Going through that section of the museum I felt like the curators cared more about showcasing their efforts to store the painting than the painting itself.

[ph1l337]

Feels like you could make a fun game out of guessing where in the image you in the most zoomed in level.

[stavros]

This is good, but I wish they would allow for more than 1:1 zoom in. 1:1 pixels on a 4k display are too small, I'd like to be able to zoom in more than that.

[jl6]

> To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera.

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?

[timwaagh]

Rembrandt did not work in this resolution so i think zoomed in it will just be a bunch of random noise.

[BrandoElFollito]

First time I visited the Rijksmuseum I was of course excited to see the night watch. I found it on a side wall, 20x15 cm and was really surprised. I was expecting something more grandiose.

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

[ck2]

Very vaguely related to image detail but you know what similarly impressed the heck out of me:

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?

[zokier]

There is fairly significant difference in radio observations and visible spectrum imaging though. You aren't going to get 5m resolution visible light image of the Moon any time soon.

[sdoering]

Whenever I see this image, or read bout it, I instantly want to listen to the great song by Ayreon, inspired by it:

"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.