When most people copy someone else’s pictures or ideas it’s generally considered plagiarism. But when Rembrandt did it, it was “emulation” – a display of his craft, experts have said, as they revealed research pointing to an image “inspired” by another in one of the Dutch master’s most famous paintings.
The Night Watch, Rembrandt’s 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.
An academic paper by Anne Lenders, a curator at the Rijksmuseum, points out the many similarities between the Night Watch’s dog and a canine illustration on the title page of a 17th-century guide on how to defend oneself against sexual temptation.
Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, told the Guardian that – just like Shakespeare – Rembrandt drew widely and shamelessly from earlier sources.
“You 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,” he said. “Rembrandt 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 – it was called emulation.”
Lenders, a curator of 17th century art involved in the public renovation of the Night Watch, said she had realised Rembrandt’s source when she visited an exhibition in the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg last year.
“I was just walking through the rooms and suddenly my eye fell on a book by Jacob Cats featuring a dog,” she said. “[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.”
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 – revealed in recent hi-tech scans – showed even more similarities, she added.
In the final painting, Rembrandt gave his dog a more active position and imagined it barking with his tongue out.
“Barking dogs don’t have their tongue hanging out of their mouth, but that is the case here,” said Dibbits, adding that the animal was also unlikely to have been so close to an animal skin drum: “Dogs are often very afraid of drums.”
However, it was a device to bring action to one corner of the painting, said Lenders. “It is fascinating how [Rembrandt] put him in a corner in the shadows, to make it more exciting and insert a moment of action,” she said.
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.