A barking dog featured in one of Rembrandt's most celebrated paintings, "The Night Watch," appears to have been copied from another Dutch artist's work, according to new research by art experts. The discovery sheds light on the 17th-century practice of artistic "emulation," where master painters freely borrowed from other sources to enhance their own creations.
Anne Lenders, a curator at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, has published an academic paper revealing striking similarities between the dog in Rembrandt's 1642 masterpiece and a canine illustration created by Dutch artist Adriaen van de Venne. The original drawing appeared on the title page of a 17th-century guide about defending oneself against sexual temptation. Lenders made the connection while visiting an exhibition at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg last year.
"I was just walking through the rooms and suddenly my eye fell on a book by Jacob Cats featuring a dog," Lenders explained. "Adriaen van de Venne had made this drawing for the title page, and that is where the dog is shown but in a mirror image." She immediately thought of "The Night Watch," looked up the image on her phone, and decided to investigate further.
Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, emphasized that such copying was not considered plagiarism during Rembrandt's era. "Just like Shakespeare, Rembrandt drew widely and shamelessly from earlier sources," Dibbits told reporters. He explained that 16th-century Italian treatises on painting actively encouraged young artists to copy extensively, make the work their own, and improve upon it to continue what another artist had started.
"Rembrandt wanted to compete with the Italian masters, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo," Dibbits said. "Now, you might call it plagiarizing or copying but it really was not in that time – it was called emulation." This practice was considered a legitimate way for artists to demonstrate their craft and artistic skill.
The similarities between the two dogs became even more apparent when researchers examined high-tech scans of "The Night Watch" that revealed Rembrandt's original chalk underdrawing. However, Rembrandt made significant modifications to van de Venne's original design. In the final painting, he gave the dog a more active position and depicted it barking with its tongue hanging out.
Dibbits noted some anatomical inconsistencies in Rembrandt's version that suggest artistic license over realism. "Barking dogs don't have their tongue hanging out of their mouth, but that is the case here," he observed. Additionally, he pointed out that the dog's proximity to an animal skin drum in the painting was unrealistic, since "dogs are often very afraid of drums."
Lenders explained that these artistic choices served a specific compositional purpose. "It was a device to bring action to one corner of the painting," she said. "It is fascinating how [Rembrandt] put him in a corner in the shadows, to make it more exciting and insert a moment of action." The dog appears in the right-hand corner of the massive painting, which depicts citizens of Amsterdam marching out to defend their city.
Adriaen van de Venne, the original creator of the dog illustration, was born in Delft in 1589 and became a versatile painter during the Dutch Golden Age. While he never achieved the same level of acclaim as Rembrandt, van de Venne was popular among his contemporaries. His collaboration with Jacob Cats, a poet and thinker famous for moralistic emblem books, made him particularly well-known during his lifetime.
This discovery adds to our understanding of how master artists of the period worked and drew inspiration from their contemporaries. The research is part of ongoing studies conducted during the public renovation of "The Night Watch," which continues to reveal new insights about one of the world's most famous paintings.
