July 26, 2024. Amsterdam.
On July 26, 2024, in Amsterdam, chemists from the University of Amsterdam discovered Rembrandt’s technique for adding golden detail to his painting, The Night Watch (1642).
They used advanced spectroscopic techniques. They identified yellow pararealgar and orange/red semi-amorphous pararealgar pigments in the painting. The chemists concluded that Rembrandt mixed these arsenic sulfide pigments with other pigments to create the golden sheen.
The study was published in the Heritage Science journal. The authors are Ph.D. students Fréderique Broers and Nouchka de Keyser from the Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. They are also researchers at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.