She signed her pictures with a star. For two centuries they hung under other men's names.
In 1893 a boisterous Dutch tavern scene changed hands in Paris as a Frans Hals — the most bankable name in seventeenth-century Haarlem. Then someone looked hard at the corner of the panel and found a monogram that was not his: a J and an L laced through a five-pointed star. A lawsuit followed. Behind the lawsuit was a discovery, and behind the discovery a painter who had been hanging in plain sight, on public walls, under the wrong name for two hundred years.
Judith Leyster was a master of the Haarlem painters' guild by twenty-four, ran a workshop with three apprentices, and was self-assured enough to drag Frans Hals himself before the guild board over a poached pupil. Then she married, moved, had five children, and slipped out of the record so completely that her best canvases were sold for generations as the work of the men around her. The little star in the corner was the thread that led back.
Haarlem to Amsterdam, and out of the record
The lifeline
1609
Baptised in Haarlem, eighth child of a brewer whose beerhouse was called the Leyster — the lodestar
1628
The Haarlem chronicler Samuel Ampzing praises her painting in print; she is still in her teens
1633
Enters the Guild of St Luke as a master — free to sign, sell, and take pupils of her own
1635
Complains to the guild when an apprentice defects to Frans Hals's studio; Hals is fined
1636
Marries the painter Jan Miense Molenaer and leaves for Amsterdam; her dated work thins to almost nothing
1660
Dies at Heemstede, aged fifty. Within a generation her name is gone from the histories
By the numbers
The measure of her
1633
The year she was entered as a master in Haarlem's Guild of St Luke — one of a bare handful of women in its rolls
3
Apprentices in her workshop by 1635, when she took Frans Hals to the guild over one of them
233
Years between her death and the 1893 misattribution case that gave her name back
~20
Paintings firmly hers in today's catalogues — a fraction of what a working master produced
What she painted
The work
1629
Serenade — a young musician lit from below as if by footlights, among her earliest signed and dated canvases. Now in the Rijksmuseum.
1630
The Happy Couple — the merry drinking scene that, sold as a Hals, would eventually be the making of her reputation. Now in the Louvre.
c. 1630
Self-Portrait — she turns from the easel mid-sentence, arm slung over the chair back in a loose, worldly pose then reserved for gentlemen, a fistful of brushes and a palette in her left hand.
1631
The Proposition — a man leans in over a woman with a handful of coins; she keeps her eyes on her sewing. Painted from her side of the transaction, which in Dutch genre painting was close to unheard of.
c. 1635
Boy Playing a Flute — often called her finest picture: a child caught between two notes, the whole quiet of the room held in the paint. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
1643
Tulip studies in watercolour for a collector's album, painted years after the tulip mania broke — among the last work she signed.
Erased, then restored
Recognition
The erasure
After her marriage in 1636 and five children — only two lived to adulthood — her dated pictures nearly stop
No inventory of her studio survives; the paintings scattered without labels
Dealers found Frans Hals's name easier to sell than hers, and signatures were not sacred
Her monogram was misread as another painter's mark; by the nineteenth century her best canvases hung as works by Hals, his brother Dirck, and her own husband
The restitution
1893: the art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot identifies seven paintings as hers, and the reattributions begin
1993: the first exhibition devoted to her alone, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Haarlem
2009: the Frans Hals Museum marks her four hundredth birthday in her own city
Her work now hangs in the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Mauritshuis and the National Gallery of Art
The city of beer, linen and painters
Haarlem
She grew up in a boom town. Haarlem had swelled with Protestant refugees from Antwerp, its wealth running on beer, bleached linen and a painters' guild dense enough to argue with itself — Frans Hals's city, and briefly hers. Her father's brewery gave her both a surname and a mark: leidstar, the star you steer by.
~39,500
Haarlem's counted population in 1622, one of the largest cities in Holland
1636
The year she left it, newly married, for Amsterdam and then Heemstede
✶
The lodestar over her father's brewery, which she turned into her signature
"Among these, one excels exceptionally: Judith Leyster, called the true leading star in art."
— Theodorus Schrevelius, Harlemias, 1648
Leidstar · lodestar · her father's brewery, her name, and her signature — the pun was intended
