Okay, that might not be completely true--but it's certainly a distinctive experience, and one that we can thank state-of-the-art technology for. Last week the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam posted an AI-constructed, ultra-high-res image of "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt. The original piece is nearly 15 feet long and more than 12 feet high and has been under intensive restoration since the early 1900s. As the story goes, in the 1600s Rembrandt was commissioned by the Amsterdam civic guard to create a sweeping oil painting for their headquarters. The Dutch portraitist constructed a scene with the city's mayor and his lieutenant--plus 32 other characters, including a dressed-up young lass.

Robert Erdmann, a senior scientist working for the Rijksmuseum, cannot help but smile when I ask him to explain -- in as much detail as possible -- how exactly he used artificial intelligence to recreate long-lost portions of Rembrandt van Rijn's most famous painting, The Night Watch (1642). "Most people just want the elevator pitch," he tells me over Zoom. The Night Watch is a mammoth of a painting, and it used to be even bigger. In 1715, it came into the possession of the bureaucrats in charge of Amsterdam's Town Hall. In order to fit it on their wall, they sliced off all four outer edges of Rembrandt's priceless masterpiece, inadvertently creating the compromised version we know today.

AMSTERDAM, June 23 (Reuters) - For the first time in 300 years, Rembrandt's famed "The Night Watch" is back on display in what researchers say is its original size, with missing parts temporarily restored in an exhibition aided by artificial intelligence. Rembrandt finished the large canvas, which portrays the captain of an Amsterdam city militia ordering his men into action, in 1642. Although it is now considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, strips were cut from all four sides of it during a move in 1715. Though those strips have not been found, another artist of the time had made a copy, and restorers and computer scientists have used that, blended with Rembrandt's style, to recreate the missing parts. "It's never the real thing, but I think it gives you different insight into the composition," Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said.

Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn is famous for his extensive oeuvre of art, which includes sketches, prints, and paintings. Among the many masterpieces within his portfolio is a particularly ambitious piece that has impressed audiences with its scale and detail centuries after the painter's death--The Night Watch (1642). This lifesize group portrait is one of the most influential pieces from the Dutch Golden Age and, since 2019, has been the subject of an extensive restoration by the Rijksmuseum called Project Night Watch. Last year, Project Night Watch released an extremely detailed--and completely free-to-download --44.8 gigapixel image of Rembrandt's masterpiece. Recently, the museum unveiled another incredible feat.

For 300 years, we only had a partial view of Rembrandt's 17th-century masterpiece "The Night Watch." But now, with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers at the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands were able to reconstruct missing pieces of the painting, giving us a rare view of what it looked like when the Golden Age Dutch artist finished it in 1642. In 1639, Rembrandt was commissioned to make the painting for a new banqueting hall at the headquarters of the Kloveniers, the civic militia guards (or musketeers) of Amsterdam. The painting was part of a series of seven militia portraits (schuttersstukken), commissioned by Captain Banninck Cocq along with 17 members of his militia. In 1715, "The Night Watch" was moved to what was at the time Amsterdam's City Hall, now the Royal Palace on Dam Square.

In the late 1970s I lived and worked briefly in the Netherlands. Often, on Sundays, I would travel to Amsterdam, go to the morning concert in the Spiegelzaal of the Concertgebouw, and afterwards walk over to the Rijksmuseum, Holland's national gallery, and spend a couple of hours there. The museum is a wonderful storehouse of Dutch art and there was always much to explore. But on nearly every visit I found myself being drawn back to one of Rembrandt's most famous pictures – The Night Watch – which I guess is to the Rijksmuseum what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre. Its official title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.

A mixture of artificial intelligence and painstaking research has allowed researchers to restore Rembrandt van Rijn's The Night Watch to its original size, the Associated Press reports, centuries after it was trimmed down to fit in a smaller wall. The work was conducted as part of the Operation Night Watch project, and the results are being exhibited in the Honor Gallery in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which sees the original painting flanked by printed strips filling in the lost sections. The Night Watch was originally completed in 1642, after which it was hung in the club house of the civil militia it was based on. But 70 years later it was moved to a new location, where there wasn't space for the whole painting and it was unceremoniously cropped to fit. A significant portion was removed from its left-hand side, along with slivers of its top, bottom, and right.

In 1642, Rembrandt van Rijn completed a dynamic painting called The Night Watch, which depicts the captain of an Amsterdam city militia urging his men into battle. But in 1715 someone cut all four sides of the canvas to hang it on a wall in Amsterdam's Town Hall, and the strips seemingly vanished into thin air. Now, researchers have restored the work to its original size using A.I. As Mike Corder reports for the Associated Press (AP), experts used a combination of scanners, X-rays and 528 digital exposures to recreate and print the missing portions of the canvas during "Operation Night Watch," a multi-million dollar restoration effort that began in 2019. Today, the newly created shreds are affixed to the edges of the painting, which is currently hanging in Rijksmuseum's honor gallery in Amsterdam.

One of Rembrandt's finest works, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (better known as The Night Watch) from 1642, is a prime representation of Dutch Golden Age painting. But the painting was greatly disfigured after the artist's death, when it was moved from its original location at the Arquebusiers Guild Hall to Amsterdam's City Hall in 1715. City officials wanted to place it in a gallery between two doors, but the painting was too big to fit. Instead of finding another location, they cut large panels from the sides as well as some sections from the top and bottom. The fragments were lost after removal.

One of Rembrandt van Rijn's biggest paintings just got a bit bigger. A marriage of art and artificial intelligence has enabled Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to recreate parts of the iconic "Night Watch" painting that were snipped off 70 years after Rembrandt finished it. The printed strips now hang flush to the edges of the 1642 painting in the museum's Honor Gallery. Their addition restores to the work the off-center focal point that that rebellious Golden Age master Rembrandt originally intended. "It can breathe now," museum director Taco Dibbits told The Associated Press on Wednesday.