Judith Leyster

After her death, Leyster fell into obscurity and was only rediscovered near the end of the nineteenth century when her monogram - JL and a star shooting out to the right - on A Lute Player and five other paintings was identified as hers.

Her father had adopted the surname 'Leyster,' meaning lodestar – guiding star – or pole star, which was also the name of the house where she was born. This star is also incorporated into her signature.

Leyster’s earliest signed and dated paintings, The Jolly Drinker and The Serenade, both from 1629 are part of the Rijksmuseum’s collection.

After her rediscovery, scholars attributed a number of works formerly thought to be by Frans Hals to her, including The Serenade.

The genre of the half-length single-figure musician originated in the northern Netherlands in Utrecht with the followers of the Italian artist Caravaggio who worked there. An example is Gerard van Honthorst’s The Merry Fiddler from 1623.

Two of the things that make Leyster’s The Serenade so remarkable are the lighting emanating from a hidden source and the daring perspective. We look at the musician from below, as if we too are looking up at his beloved whom he is serenading.

Paintings like A Fool Holding a Jug were direct challenges to Frans Hals, who specialized in the depiction of comic figures clad in outlandish colourful costumes.

Leyster joined the Haarlem painters’ guild in 1633 and two years later was embroiled in a dispute with Frans Hals over a pupil, Willem Woutersz, who had left her studio after only a few days to join his. Leyster received only partial compensation, and was also fined for failing to report this pupil to the guild in the first place.

At age 26, Leyster married fellow artist Jan Miense Molenaer, who was also 26 years old, in 1636. The couple lived in Amsterdam, Heemstede and Haarlem, and had at least 5 children, only two of which survived infancy.

We primarily know Leyster as a painter, but one drawing by her has also been preserved: this watercolor of a tulip from 1643. During the Tulip Mania a few years earlier, a bulb of this variety, the Vroege Brabantsson, fetched a fortune.