{"id":163809,"date":"2025-09-23T12:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T12:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/163809\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T12:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T12:50:07","slug":"dog-in-rembrandts-the-night-watch-was-copied-from-lesser-known-artist-rembrandt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/163809\/","title":{"rendered":"Dog in Rembrandt\u2019s The Night Watch was \u2018copied from lesser-known artist\u2019 | Rembrandt"},"content":{"rendered":"

When most people copy someone else\u2019s pictures or ideas it\u2019s generally considered plagiarism. But when Rembrandt<\/a> did it, it was \u201cemulation\u201d \u2013 a display of his craft, experts have said, as they revealed research pointing to an image \u201cinspired\u201d by another in one of the Dutch master\u2019s most famous paintings.<\/p>\n

The Night Watch, Rembrandt\u2019s 1642 masterpiece showing the citizens of Amsterdam marching out to defend the city, features a barking dog in the right-hand corner that is largely copied from a popular drawing by a lesser-known Dutch artist, it has been claimed.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe dog in The Night Watch was copied from a drawing by another artist, it has been claimed. Photograph: Rijksmuseum<\/p>\n

An academic paper by Anne Lenders, a curator at the Rijksmuseum, points out the many similarities between the Night Watch\u2019s dog and a canine illustration on the title page of a 17th-century guide on how to defend oneself against sexual temptation.<\/p>\n

Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, told the Guardian that \u2013 just like Shakespeare \u2013 Rembrandt drew widely and shamelessly from earlier sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see that in Italian treatises on painting in the 16th century, it really was the intention that you as a starting artist would copy a lot, make it your own, so that you could improve on it and continue the work another artist had left behind,\u201d he said. \u201cRembrandt wanted to compete with the Italian masters, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo. Now, you might call it plagiarising or copying but it really was not in that time \u2013 it was called emulation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lenders, a curator of 17th century art involved in the public renovation<\/a> of the Night Watch, said she had realised Rembrandt\u2019s source when she visited an exhibition<\/a> in the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just walking through the rooms and suddenly my eye fell on a book by Jacob Cats featuring a dog,\u201d she said. \u201c[The Dutch artist, poet and publisher] Adriaen van de Venne had made this drawing for the title page, and that is where the dog is shown but in a mirror image.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was immediately reminded of the Night Watch, looked up the image on her phone and decided to study it further. The chalk underdrawing of the Night Watch \u2013 revealed in recent hi-tech scans \u2013 showed even more similarities, she added.<\/p>\n

In the final painting, Rembrandt gave his dog a more active position and imagined it barking with his tongue out.<\/p>\n

\u201cBarking dogs don\u2019t have their tongue hanging out of their mouth, but that is the case here,\u201d said Dibbits, adding that the animal was also unlikely to have been so close to an animal skin drum: \u201cDogs are often very afraid of drums.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, it was a device to bring action to one corner of the painting, said Lenders. \u201cIt is fascinating how [Rembrandt] put him in a corner in the shadows, to make it more exciting and insert a moment of action,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Born in Delft in 1589, Van de Venne went on to become a versatile painter of the Dutch Golden Age and although he never achieved the acclaim of Rembrandt, he was popular. The work he did with Cats, a poet and thinker best known for his moralistic Emblem books, made him particularly well-known to his contemporaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When most people copy someone else\u2019s pictures or ideas it\u2019s generally considered plagiarism. But when Rembrandt did it,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-163809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}