Rembrandt’s Night Watch dog traced to Adriaen van de Venne sketch

The Rijksmuseum identified a sketch by Adriaen van de Venne as the inspiration for the dog in Rembrandt’s 'The Night Watch'. Photo / Ramon van Flymen, AFP

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam said today that it had finally sniffed out a sketch that inspired the dog in Rembrandt’s 17th century painting The Night Watch.

Anne Lenders, a Rijksmuseum curator, said she made the discovery while walking through the exhibition gallery of Dutch Golden Age painter Adriaen van de Venne at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg.

“Suddenly my eye fell on a book by Jacob Catz with a dog depicted on it and the design drawing that was made by Adriaen van de Venne was also on display,” she told AFP.

Using her phone to compare the two images side by side, the 39-year-old Dutchwoman saw “striking similarities” between van de Venne’s dog and the canine depicted in Rembrandt’s 1642 masterpiece.

“Immediately when I saw the dog, The Night Watch dog came to my mind,” she said.

Each dog is shown with a collar and ring, their heads angled the same way and their bodies lowered diagonally across the picture plane.

Chalk sketches beneath the paint of The Night Watch, uncovered with the help of curators, restorers, and scientists, confirmed Lenders’ hypothesis about Rembrandt’s inspiration.

“The Night Watch is Rembrandt’s most famous painting and we always think that it was created out of nothing, out of his genius,” Taco Dibbits, the director of the Rijksmuseum, told AFP.

“But Rembrandt, like the great Italian masters Michelangelo and Raphael, used works of art by artists before him to make his own compositions.”

Although discreet, the dog is renowned by art lovers for bringing a vitality to the colossal 363cm by 437cm group portrait representing a company of Amsterdam’s 17th-century civic militia.

The animal has been the subject of debate among canine specialists through the years.

“One says it’s a Dutch smouse, the other one says it’s a French Wolf de Bretagne so there’s a lot of discussion but of course Rembrandt was an artist and Van de Venne was an artist, so they took the liberty an artist has to change things so in a sense they created their own breed.”

While Dibbits credited “well informed luck” for the find, he said such discovery could only have happened with the help of “Operation Night Watch”, a large-scale public restoration project launched in 2019.

“You would say, well, the painting is so famous, everything has already been discovered,” he said,

“But of course you always with art discover new things and that’s why Rembrandt is such a great artist.”

- Agence France-Presse