Art history mystery: Unusual compound found in Rembrandt’s masterpiece ‘The Night Watch’

AMSTERDAM — Painted in 1642, The Evening Check out is probably Rembrandt’s most famed painting. Considered a masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age, the painting is very large (12ft x14.5ft) and significantly makes use of light-weight and shadow to depict the city’s voluntary citizen militia at the time. Shown at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the portray has been undergoing scrupulous conservations and investigation efforts as portion of Operation Night time Watch because 2019. Now, an worldwide team of researchers is reporting a rare guide compound is present in the portray by itself.

The discovering marks the first time ever this kind of a discovery has been manufactured, delivering worthwhile new insights into 17th century painting approaches and the conservation background of the painting.

Inside the framework of Procedure Night time Observe, a workforce of global researchers in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum,  joined forces to assess how the portray resources respond chemically and with time.

Additional precisely, researchers merged multi-scale imaging solutions to chemically review the products applied by Rembrandt even though portray The Night Enjoy. An X-ray scanning instrument formulated at the College of Antwerp, Belgium was applied immediately to the painting, but little fragments taken from the painting had been also examined via synchrotron micro X-ray probes, at the ESRF, the European Synchrotron (France), and the PETRA-III facility in Germany.

This dual approach unveiled the presence of a unusual and unforeseen organo-metallic compound termed guide formate. The compound experienced under no circumstances been found in any historic paintings just before this project.

“In paintings, guide formates have only been documented once in 2020, but in product paintings (mock-up, clean paints). And there, shock: not only do we uncover guide formates, but we discover them in areas where there is no direct pigment, white, yellow. We feel that possibly they disappear quickly, this is why they were not detected in old master paintings right up until now,” clarifies Victor Gonzalez, a researcher from The French Countrywide Centre for Scientific Exploration (CNRS) and initially writer of the paper, in a release.

Why did not lead formates disappear in Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’?

Study authors posit answering that issue is crucial to being familiar with Rembrandt as a painter.

“In Operation Night time Look at we focus on Rembrandt’s painting strategy, the affliction of the portray and how we can best protect it for foreseeable future generations. The guide formate presents us beneficial new clues about the probable use of guide-dependent oil paint by Rembrandt and the prospective influence of oil-dependent varnishes from earlier conservation treatment plans, and the sophisticated chemistry of historic oil paintings,” provides Katrien Keune, head of science at Rijksmuseum and professor at the University of Amsterdam.

The place does this compound come from? Could it possibly offer a glimpse into Rembrandt’s workshop recipes, or lose light-weight on the chemical mechanisms active in the levels of aged paint? In pursuit of answers, scientists analyzed fragments taken from The Evening Observe, as well as design samples prepped in a lab simulating the painter’s formulations.

The research team to begin with went with the speculation that Rembrandt applied an natural and organic medium (linseed oil) containing dissolved guide oxide (PbO litharge) to enrich its siccative homes.

“Thanks to the unique analytical efficiency of the ESRF, the world’s brightest synchrotron light source, we could map the presence of formates at a micrometric scale, and adhere to their development in excess of time,” explains Maritime Cotte, scientist at the ESRF.

The spatial organization of the compounds at the micro-scale, as nicely as the dynamics of their formulation, enabled scientists to recommend new hypotheses concerning the chemical problems of their in situ crystallization in previous paint levels. “In addition to offering details on Rembrandt’s pictorial tactics, this research opens up new avenues on the reactivity of historical pigments, and therefore on the preservation of heritage,” concludes Koen Janssens, Professor at the College of Antwerp.

The investigate staff states their subsequent step is to conduct extra analysis on the origin of these formates, and potentially establish if they could originate from earlier restoration therapies.

Scientists collaborating on the analyze include researchers from the CNRS, the ESRF the European Synchrotron, the College of Amsterdam and the University of Antwerp. The research is printed in Angewandte Chemie.