New results from the Rijksmuseum’s ongoing research into Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” suggest that he treated his canvas with a lead-based substance before painting the ground layer.
In 2019, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam started Operation Night Watch, a thorough investigation of Rembrandt’s famous painting, “The Night Watch”. For several months, researcher took X-rays of the painting and used several other techniques, even exploring the back of the canvas, to learn more about the massive masterpiece that Rembrandt finished in 1642.
Operation Night Watch already found a pencil sketch hidden below the painting and showed which type of drying oil Rembrandt used on the painting. Now, in a new research paper published last week in Science Advances, the museum researchers shared that they found that Rembrandt treated the canvas of “The Night Watch” with a lead-based substance even before painting his ground layer.
As part of the research on the painting, a miniscule sample of paint from the canvas was studied in detail. With a method called x-ray ptychography, the researchers were able to compare tiny differences in the molecular structures of the material to find the composition of each layer. This is how they discovered that there was lead in the layer closest to the canvas. That was unusual and different from how Rembrandt normally painted.
In some of his smaller paintings, Rembrandt prepared his canvases with a double ground layer. Usually the first layer would be a ground layer of red earth pigments, and the layer above that would have lead white in it. But to find lead in the bottom layer means that Rembrandt used a different method to make The Night Watch.
To further examine why there was lead directly on the canvas, the team also studied measurements taken during an X-ray fluorescence scan of the entire painting. Here they noticed that the lead was found throughout the whole painting and was applied with large brushstrokes, which further confirmed that Rembrandt had treated the canvas with lead before working on the paint layers.
While chemistry and physics could prove that Rembrandt treated his canvas with lead, they didn’t explain why. To understand the reasons behind Rembrandt new method, the museum researchers had to put the painting in context. First, one obvious difference between “The Night Watch” and Rembrandt’s other paintings is that it’s enormous. The painting measures over three by four meters (12 by 14.5 feet) and the art researchers believe that the sheer size it would have made Rembrandt look for a less heavy alternative to his usual ground layers.
Rembrandt also had to put the painting’s location into consideration. Although it it’s now on display in the climate controlled halls of the Rijksmuseum, the painting was originally commissioned by militia captain Frans Banninck Cocq (that’s him with the red sash in the middle of the painting) to be hung on a relatively damp wall in a musketeers’ shooting range. Rembrandt likely knew that the standard method of preparing canvases with glue would fail.
Just a few years earlier, physician and chemist Theodore de Mayerne published a manuscript with extensive notes on painting techniques. This included a suggestion that impregnating a canvas with lead-rich oil could be a more damp-resistant alternative. Rembrandt may have read this manuscript, and used that as inspiration for his canvas treatment.
Like the other studies to come out of Operation Night Watch, this discovery brings Rembrandt’s process to life. You can almost imagine him preparing his canvas and getting ready to paint this huge group portrait that still impresses viewers almost four hundred years later.
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