Rembrandt's Night Watch microbes go on show

Microbes found on Rembrandt's “Night Watch” are going on show in Amsterdam in a new exhibition that reveals the microscopic life covering one of the Dutch Golden Age's most famous paintings.

“The Night Watch Lives” is a joint project by the Rijksmuseum, where the painting hangs, and the Artis-Micropia Museum. It displays bacteria isolated from samples taken over six months at around 60 spots on the painting and cultivated into colonies.

The colonies are being shown in Petri dishes alongside a life-size reproduction of the painting at Artis-Micropia, an Amsterdam museum devoted to microbes.

Eline van Bloois, a microbiologist at the museum, said many of the microbes found on the painting are common on human skin or in soil. She said the microbes are not harmful to the painting.

Van Bloois said it was not possible to determine whether any microbe could date back to Rembrandt himself. “From one microbe, you cannot say whether it's been on there for 400 years or for a day,” she said.

One surprising find was Microbacterium saccharophilum, a bacterium commonly found at a Japanese sugar refinery. It was found in an area where varnish had been removed.

The exhibition is part of “Operation Night Watch,” a large research and restoration project that has been under way since 2019 in a glass chamber at the Rijksmuseum. It opens to the public on November 11.