Rijksmuseum unveils AI-restored edges of Rembrandt's The Night Watch

In June 2021, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam unveiled a digitally reconstructed version of Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642). It showed the strips of canvas that were cut from the painting in 1715, when it was moved to Amsterdam's town hall and trimmed to fit between two columns. The cuts removed parts of all four sides, including figures at the left edge.

The reconstruction relied on a smaller 17th-century copy painted by Gerrit Lundens, a contemporary of Rembrandt, which preserved the original composition before the cropping. Because Lundens worked in a different scale and style, the museum used artificial intelligence, a neural network trained to match colour, brushwork and detail, to adapt the copy's missing areas to Rembrandt's manner.

The digital edges were displayed alongside the painting during Operation Night Watch, the museum's large public research and conservation project, which began in 2019. The result gave visitors a closer idea of Rembrandt's intended, more balanced composition. The original canvas itself was left unaltered.