A curator at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has discovered more or less by accident that a barking dog in Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch painting is a near-identical copy of a 1619 drawing by fellow Dutch artist Adriaen van de Venne. “The resemblance is so strong that at the very first moment I thought he (Rembrandt) must have used this,” she added. In the Night Watch, the dog adds tension to a dark corner of the crowded composition, crouching and apparently barking near a drummer called Jacob Jorisz and just behind one of the famous 1642 painting’s main characters, Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch. Operation Night Watch began in 2019 with an extensive study of the painting and is continuing with restoration work that is likely to take years to complete. A 17th century drawing inspired Rembrandt when painting a dog in the Night Watch (Peter Dejong/AP)“One tends to think, well, it’s been researched so well, we know everything about it,” Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said.