Judith Leyster
Haarlem's laughing painter.
Judith Leyster had her own workshop and pupils in Haarlem. For a long time her works were attributed to Frans Hals.
Judith Leyster was baptised in Haarlem on 28 July 1609. Her father owned a brewery called Leyster, “the lodestar”, and the family took its name from it. She later signed her pictures with the initials JL and a star. Where she learned to paint is not known for certain. As early as 1628 she was mentioned as a painter in a chronicle of Haarlem, when she was only nineteen.
In 1633 she became a member of the painters' guild in Haarlem, one of very few women. This gave her the right to have her own workshop and pupils. She did not hesitate to defend her interests. When one of her pupils moved to Frans Hals's workshop in 1635, she sued Hals and was awarded compensation.
Her best-known work is a self-portrait from around 1630 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in which she turns from the easel with a brush in her hand and smiles at us. She painted merry musicians, drinking men and children in a lively style with rapid strokes resembling that of Frans Hals. In The Proposition of 1631 in the Mauritshuis a man offers money to a woman sitting sewing. She ignores him, and the picture has been interpreted as an unusual depiction of a woman's point of view.
In 1636 she married the painter Jan Miense Molenaer, and they moved to Amsterdam. After her marriage she painted considerably less, and she probably worked in the family business. She had several children. She died in 1660.
After her death she was forgotten, and several of her paintings were sold as works by Frans Hals. In 1893 her monogram was discovered on a picture the Louvre had bought as a Hals. Since then scholars have identified more and more of her works, and she is now regarded as one of the important painters of the Dutch Golden Age.