The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam announced last week that the dog depicted in the lower righthand corner of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Night Watch (1642) was based on a popular drawing from the 17th-century.
The Night Watch is currently undergoing an extensive study and restoration in a specially designed glass chamber located in the museum’s galleries that began in 2019. Called Operation Night Watch, the initiative “brings scientists, restorers and curators together with experts from our project partner AkzoNobel to maintain the painting in optimal condition for the future,” according to the museum’s website.
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This new revelation came about after Anne Lenders, curator of Operation Night Watch, visited an exhibition of Adriaen van de Venne at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg, the Netherlands. “When I saw the drawing in an exhibition, I immediately thought of the dog in The Night Watch,” she said in a statement. “The dog’s head, collar and pose have such a strong resemblance that it can only mean Rembrandt used this drawing as a source of inspiration. The follow-up research has confirmed this.”
Lenders told the New York Times that it was unclear if Rembrandt used as inspiration the van de Venne version, which was the title page for Jacob Cats’s 1620 book Self-stryt (Self-Conflict) or another engraving that copied van de Venne’s dog by François Schillemans and was used for the title page of a different book. “But we know that he must have been familiar with one of the two,” she told the Times.
The dog is a beloved part of Rembrandt’s painting, if a bit of an outlier to the overall composition, which depicts the civic guard as they head out of an evening patrol. A video produced by the Rijksmuseum, titled “Did Rembrandt steal a dog?,” describes the animal as a “mysterious creature” and “a blur of fur,” who is likely “tense from the noise of the beating drum and the firing musket.”
Comparison of the dogs by Rembrandt and Adriaen Van de Venne.
Courtesy Rijksmuseum
As part of the multimillion dollar restoration project, which is also removing yellow varnishes from The Night Watch, researches subjected the portion of the painting with the dog to MA-XRF (macro X-ray fluorescence) analysis and discovered an under-painted sketch, showing the dog “with its right front leg more bent, and the chest closer to the ground” or “even more similar to Van de Venne’s drawing,” according to a press release.
In a statement, Rijksmuseum general director Taco Dibbits said, “It is remarkable that new discoveries are still being made about one of the most studied paintings in the world, almost 400 years after it was made. This finding gives us yet more insight into Rembrandt’s thought processes when creating this work.”