Cool Finds

The Mystery of the Small Dog in Rembrandt’s Monumental Masterpiece ‘The Night Watch’ Has Officially Been Solved

When a curator spotted a strikingly similar image of a dog by a lesser-known Dutch artist, she wondered if it could have inspired the pup in Rembrandt’s famous 1642 painting

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

September 25, 2025

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

When Rembrandt van Rijn unveiled The Night Watch in 1642, it was unlike anything audiences had seen before. While typical military portraits showed men in stationary poses, the Dutch artist’s painting depicted a group of civic guardsmen in a moment of action, and his masterful use of light and shadows evoked energy and movement across the nearly 15-foot-long canvas.

Amid the commotion, some viewers likely missed the small dog crouching in the shadows. Now, an eagle-eyed researcher has uncovered the source material that may have inspired the pup, who can be found at the foot of a drummer in the bottom-right corner of Rembrandt’s canvas.

“The drummer beats his drum, and the dog reacts and starts barking,” Anne Lenders, a curator of 17th-century painting at the Rijksmuseum, tells the London Times’ Bruno Waterfield. “So you really have this suggestion of noise and movement. The dog really heightens the liveliness of the painting and the drama.”

Lenders is part of Operation Night Watch, a yearslong restoration effort at the Amsterdam museum, which houses Rembrandt’s masterpiece. After working so closely with the painting, she’s gotten to know it well.

Recently, when she was browsing an exhibition at the Zeeuws Museum, located a few hours away from the Rijksmuseum in the Dutch city of Middelburg, something strange caught her eye: an image of a dog that looked oddly familiar.

“Immediately when I saw this dog, I thought of The Night Watch,” Lenders tells the New York Times’ Nina Siegal. “I recognized it because of the way it turned its head.”

Lenders found a photo of Rembrandt’s dog on her phone, and she was floored by the similarities between the two images. Both animals are crouched on their front legs, with their heads twisted upward at a nearly identical angle. Their mouths are slightly open, and their collars are designed in a similar style.

Even so, the two images aren’t identical. Rembrandt’s dog isn’t crouched quite as low to the ground, and its tongue is visible. The pups are mirror images of each other, facing opposite directions.

The image Lenders found in the museum was on the title page of a 1619 book by the Dutch writer Jacob Cats. That version of the artwork was an engraving that had been adapted from a drawing by Adriaen van de Venne, who was, like Rembrandt, a 17th-century Dutch artist. Van de Venne’s original artwork is flipped, with his dog facing the same direction as Rembrandt’s. It’s housed in the Rijksmuseum’s collections, though nobody had previously noticed the similarities.  

“It is remarkable that new discoveries are still being made about one of the most studied paintings in the world, almost 400 years after it was made,” says Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s director, in a statement. “This finding gives us yet more insight into Rembrandt’s thought processes when creating this work.”

Operation Night Watch, which began in 2019, is the most comprehensive analysis of the artwork ever conducted. The five-year research phase, which ended just last year, revealed several new discoveries about the painting’s pigments, lead base layer and preparatory sketches.

Based on the imaging, the researchers think Rembrandt sketched the dog as part of an underdrawing on the canvas. That version, which shows the animal in “more of a downward position,” is even more similar to van de Venne’s, as Lenders explains in a video.

Dibbits tells the Guardian’s Senay Boztas that this sort of “emulation” was common in Rembrandt’s time. When artists were starting out, there was an expectation that they would “continue the work another artist had left behind,” building on the techniques developed by painters who had come before them.

The researchers think Rembrandt would have been familiar with van de Venne’s piece, which depicts the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife seducing Joseph. Rembrandt painted the same scene in Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655), in which “Joseph’s hand gesture and upward gaze strongly recall the pose of the central figure of Joseph in the drawing,” per the Rijksmuseum’s statement.

Conservators are now working on the second phase of Operation Night Watch, which involves removing old varnish that’s yellowed over the years. They’re conducting the conservation work behind a glass barrier as visitors to the Rijksmuseum look on. They plan to carefully restore the part of the canvas that depicts the dog, returning it closer to Rembrandt’s original vision from more than 350 years ago.

Editors’ note, September 25, 2025: This article has been updated to correctly state the length of The Night Watch.

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.