The Rijksmuseum museum said that it had finally sniffed out a sketch that inspired the dog in Rembrandt’s iconinc „NightWatch“ painting.
It didn’t exactly take dogged detective work for an art sleuth in Amsterdam to solve a canine conundrum dating back to the Dutch Golden Age.
Anne Lenders, a curator at the city’s landmark Rijksmuseum, said Tuesday that it was more or less by accident that she discovered that the barking dog in Rembrandt van Rijn’s famous „Night Watch“ is a near-identical copy of one that features in a 1619 pen and ink drawing by fellow Dutch artist Adriaen van de Venne.
„I wasn’t looking for this; it was really unexpected“, Lenders said in the glass room where „Night Watch“ is undergoing extensive restoration.
She was visiting an exhibition at the Zeeuws Museum in the southern Netherlands when her eye fell on a picture of a dog by Van de Venne that was printed in a book by the poet Jacob Cats. The original drawing – which turned out to be part of the Rijksmuseum’s own vast collection – was also on display.
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.
