[Rockhounds] Dutch Chemists Finally Work Out How Rembrandt Achieved the Golden Lustre in His ‘The Night Watch’ Painting

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Chemists from Holland’s University of Amsterdam (UvA) have finally worked
out how Rembrandt <https://www.artnews.com/t/rembrandt/> managed to
embellish his *The Night Watch
<https://www.artnews.com/t/the-night-watch/> *(1642) painting with striking
golden detail.

They used high-tech spectroscopic techniques to identify the presence of
pararealgar [yellow] and semi-amorphous pararealgar [orange/red] pigments
in minute detail in the famous artwork. The research team concluded that
the Dutch artist intentionally mixed these particular arsenic sulfide
pigments with other pigments to create the golden sheen.

The study was published in the Heritage Science journal by Fréderique
Broers and Nouchka de Keyser, who are Ph.D. students at UvA’s Van ’t Hoff
Institute for Molecular Sciences, and also researchers at Amersterdam’s
Rijksmuseum.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/dutch-chemists-work-out-how-rembrandt-made-gold-paint-in-the-night-watch-1234712914/