Rembrandt copied another artist’s dog for his famous Night Watch painting

An art restorer points at the image of a dog in Rembrandt’s Night Watch (Peter Dejong/AP)

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.

Anne Lenders said: “I wasn’t looking for this. It was really unexpected.”