Rembrandt’s Night Watch gets bigger thanks to AI

Rembrandt van Rijn's popular painting The Night Watch is now been exhibited restored to its original size in the Honor Gallery in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum thanks to artificial intelligence. Experts have used new technology to recreate the missing portions of the old painting.

The Night Watch was completed in 1642 and 70 years later it was moved to a new location, where there wasn’t enough space to fit it, and it was cropped to fit removing important pieces from all sides.

The missing pieces may never have been recovered, but researchers were able to reconstruct them thanks to Gerrit Lundens, a painter who designed a smaller copy of the original. Over the course of two years, it took many scans, X-rays and 528 digital exposures to train an AI model to imitate Rembrandt's style and fill in the gaps.