If the dog in one corner of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) painting looks a little out of place as the brave citizens of Amsterdam march out to defend the city—he is. New research into Rembrandt van Rijn’s masterpiece suggests that this barking dog was inspired by the title page of a widely available book on the temptations of the flesh, illustrated by the Dutch artist, poet and publisher Adriaen van de Venne.
The Night Watch is currently being publicly restored inside a glass box at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The museum’s curator of 17th century Dutch paintings, Anne Lenders, says she realised the dog looked like the Van de Venne drawing when she visited an exhibition on the lesser-known artist at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg last year.
The dog can be seen in the lower righthand corner of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
“As soon as I saw that dog, The Night Watch dog came into my mind—I recognised it by the turn of the head,” she says. Further investigation into a chalk underdrawing of The Night Watch, using macro X-ray florescence (MA-XRF) scans, showed even more resemblances between the two dogs. In the final painting, Rembrandt, however, put his dog on all four legs and added a tongue to suggest to the viewer that it was barking at a massive drum.
“It’s very clever how Rembrandt adjusted his dog, putting it in an active stance, vigilant and alert,” she says. “At any moment, his dog could run away, and this strengthens the living quality of the painting. It feels like something could happen at any moment and the dog plays a very important role.”
Adriaen van de Venne's Design for the engraved Title Page of Jacob Cats Self-stryt (1619) with the dog in the lower lefthand corner Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
Rembrandt is known to have had a wide collection of Van de Venne’s prints, Lenders says. She adds that a figure in the same illustration also resembles elements of another Rembrandt painting, Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655) in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Taco Dibbits, the director of the Rijksmuseum, explains that what we might now call copying was both part of an artist’s training and a display of erudition. “He didn’t want people to call him Rembrandt van Rijn, but just Rembrandt, like Michaelangelo,” Dibbits says. “And he really wanted, just like the Italians, to be that learned artist who based himself on prints from his predecessors, who could copy so incredibly well and know them so intimately that he developed them further.”
