The Next Rembrandt

Why it works

Unveiled in Amsterdam on 5 April 2016, The Next Rembrandt is a portrait the Dutch master never painted: a man in his thirties in a black hat and white collar, facing right, whose features were derived from analysis of Rembrandt's 346 known paintings and then 3D printed so the surface mimics his brushwork. J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam spent 18 months on it for ING, a long-time sponsor of Dutch art, working with Microsoft, Delft University of Technology and art historians from the Mauritshuis and the Rembrandt House. It is studied as the point at which data stopped being only a targeting tool and became the creative material itself, and as a sponsorship turned into a public argument about whether software can make art. At Cannes 2016 it took two Grand Prix, in Cyber and in Creative Data, the first Grand Prix the Creative Data jury had ever awarded.