It can be hard to make out the dog in the lower right-hand corner of Rembrandt’s monumental group portrait, “The Night Watch.” The paint has faded over time, and the dog falls into shadow, so its outline appears like just a blotch on the canvas.
Yet for those in the know, the dog is a beloved feature that parents delight in pointing out to their children at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
On Tuesday, researchers at the museum announced that they had discovered Rembrandt’s inspiration for the dog: a drawing by an artist named Adriaen van de Venne that was copied by another artist, François Schillemans, as an engraving for the title page of a book.
“We don’t know if Rembrandt used the drawing or the engraving,” said Anne Lenders, a curator of 17th-century painting at the museum. “But we know that he must have been familiar with one of the two.”
The museum’s director, Taco Dibbits, said the finding emphasized that Rembrandt, like many artists, studied and consulted other creators before making his own work.
“We always think about Rembrandt as a genius who created things out of nothing,” Dibbits said. “But he had a huge print collection, he was very aware of his predecessors, and he borrowed from them as well. I wouldn’t call it copying or plagiarizing. It was more like borrowing inspiration, and then changing it around.”
Lenders said she had discovered the source of inspiration while attending an exhibition of van de Veen’s works at the Zeeuws Museum in the southern Dutch city of Middelburg.
“I was just walking around at this exhibition, and suddenly my eye fell on a book,” she said. “Immediately when I saw this dog, I thought of ‘The Night Watch.’ I recognized it because of the way it turned its head.”
She called up an image of Rembrandt’s dog on her phone to compare the two.
“There were more similarities than I initially thought there would be,” she said.
Subsequent study confirmed her suspicions: She found that the van de Veen drawing was a design for the title page of a 1619 book — “Self-Stryt” (“Self-Restraint”) by Jacob Cats — which was then turned into an engraving by Schillemans. The dog in the drawing faced the same direction as Rembrandt’s dog, and the dog in the engraving came out as its mirror image.
Rembrandt adapted the dog for “The Night Watch” — a 1642 work officially titled “Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq” — depicting the animal in a more alert pose, apparently reacting to the sound of the drum played by a nearby drummer. “He looks as if he might run away at any moment,” said Lenders.
Rembrandt’s dog suffered something more shocking than a drum beat in the 1970s, when a mentally-ill vandal attacked “Night Watch” with a knife. The attack “cut so deep into the Dutch identity that they wanted it restored as fast as possible,” Dibbits said. “The retouching was done with broad strokes, and they misinterpreted some of the dog’s anatomy.”
Since 2019, the painting has been undergoing a multimillion-dollar examination and restoration that aims to repair the damage, Dibbits said, as well as removing some yellow varnish and reversing some previous retouchings. During the process, conservators with the project discovered something new about Rembrandt’s working process: He had sketched the dog as part of an under-drawing on the canvas, and what we see of the smudgy figure is not only faded paint but mostly chalk.
Yet an element of mystery about the dog remains: Canine specialists consulted by the Rijksmuseum said they could not identify the specific breed of dog, because the idea of a dog pedigree didn’t exist in the 17th century, Lenders said.
Some experts think that it may be what we now call a Dutch Smoushond, a family dog, or a precursor to the Basset Fauve de Bretagne, a short-legged hound.
“Even 400 years after the creation of one of the most known paintings, you can still discover things,” Dibbits said. “With art, you will always continue to pose questions, and in this case, it’s: Which dog is it?”
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