Digital Colour Reconstruction of the Background of The Jewish Bride
Reconstruction of Smalt and Yellow Lake in the background of The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt
E.F. Witteveen (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
J. Dik – Mentor
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Abstract
Rembrandt was a unique painter of his era, and one of his most outstanding pieces is The Jewish Bride. He mastered the art of manipulating pigments to create unique paint mixtures and textures. This can be seen in his painting, The Jewish Bride.
In the background of The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt mixed five pigments together: bone black, red earth, smalt (a blue pigment), yellow earth and yellow lake. Smalt and yellow lake are unstable pigments in oil and their colour fades over time. Due to the degradation process of smalt, the oil matrix and the top layer have both changed its appearance into a transparent monochrome brown. The colour loss and change of colour affect the pictorial impression created by the painting.
The goal of this thesis is to digital colour reconstruct the background of The Jewish Bride to show how it might have looked when non-degraded smalt and yellow lake were present.
In this work, the painting is analysed with different micro and macro techniques: microscopy, SEM-EDX, Macro-XRF, and hyperspectral imaging. The outcomes of microscopy, SEM-EDX and Macro-XRF are combined to show the distribution and to quantify the amount of smalt and yellow lake in the background.
Knowing the distribution of smalt and yellow lake in the painting made it possible to digital mix the colours back to their primary appearance. To achieve this, the hyperspectral data were used, together with the Kubelka-Munk theory. This was later transferred to RGB values, which results in a digital colour reconstruction.
The digital colour reconstructions show a trend of what the painting might have looked like, at the time Rembrandt painted it.