You guys are amazing!! How you always find perfect illustrations and pertinent posts is outstanding to carry the discussion
I'm glad you agree Mercenary that this is a Dutch painting. While I'm no art expert, it certainly has the 'feel' of Dutch masters .
As I mentioned earlier, Rembrandt had a nominal collection of exotic weaponry from Indonesian and Asian areas which had been brought back by Dutch VOC ships.
It would seem that his inclusion of these unusual weapons were placed in his works for 'effect', and it seems that other artists followed suit.
The interaction between Europe and these exotic ports of call with various material culture and of course weaponry is well established. As seen, there were European versions of various forms from China and other Asian locations in style and decoration. The decoration known as Tonquinese was used through the 18th century on court and smallswords. In many cases Chinese and other artisans were brought into European shops to work on many of the 'exotic' forms.
In the case of this dha, obviously we are looking at an artists conception of the sword, however in my opinion, this looks fully like an original item from Thailand (then Siam) as it carries the distinctive features usually seen on them. The only thing that would suggest it being a European example would be its size, dha usually smaller (but I have seen them this large).
Artists were usually quite accurate in their depictions of detail used in their work, however sometimes various prop or accent items may be out of context as seen in Rembrandt's Biblical works.
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