Night Watch at Rijksmuseum
Published on: 21st of December 2011
Current city: Amsterdam
Light has been always important in Painting and is a source of inspiration for many artists. Netherlands was the birthplace for some of the most famous painters in art history and since I was in Amsterdam it seemed to me to be the ideal place to explore light in painting. A limited schedule and a queue that wrapped around the building made me avoid the Van Gogh Museum. This appeared to be the obvious option, but I accepted the suggestion by Rogier Van der Heide who I had met a few days before, and instead I headed to the Rijksmuseum. In here you can admire some of the art pieces by the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
The use of light in the paintings by these artists from the 1600’s is remarkable. Vermeer immortalised in the film ‘Girl with a pearl earring’ reproduces natural lighting in a very special way. I remember seeing once the making of that film and it was really interesting how determinant light was for the success of the movie. One of the major technical challenges on the film production was to achieve the quality of light that Vermeer’s paintings are famous for. On the film a giant light box was built to eliminate all harsh shadows and make it look like as natural as possible.
Rembrandt on the other side creates dramatic effects primarily by strong contrasts of light and shadow. A good of example of this is the Night Watch, one of his most famous paintings which is actually housed in this museum. As a very large painting it has always been hard to illuminate it properly and give it the right notability that it deserves. Rogier seems to have found gracefully the solution for the problem and no one better than him to explain how he tackled it on his TED talk
Rijksmuseum is really an outstanding place!