Judith Leyster is the best-known Dutch representative of a handful of famous women painters active during the seventeenth century. She was one of Frans Hate's* most talented and successful students. Her works sometimes fall so closely to his manner that the two are confused, and we know that Leyster copied Hals at times (note her copy of Hals's Lute Player, Amsterdam, Rijksmuscum). She did not develop Hals's daring language of brushwork to create her images. At her best, however, she achieved formally complex images, with a beautiful and sensitive treatment of light and color and an interpretation of humanity at once delicate, vulnerable, and, though vibrant, somewhat tragic (see, for example, her celebrated Boy Playing a Flute, signed, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). The first woman painter admitted to the Haarlem painters' guild, Leyster had a fairly successful career and once legally challenged her former master for the return of a "pirated" student. Besides genre scenes mainly portraying children, she produced some portraits, still lifes, and flower pieces. Some of her exquisite watercolors of flowers are still preserved. Judith's surname derives from the name of her father's brewery in Haarlem; the Ley-ster(re) (Lodestar), which she often represented in her signatures by an L with a star. She is considered a highly precocious artist, since she is mentioned by Samuel Ampzing as a painter working in Haarlem in 1627 (when she was eighteen years old). In 1628 her parents had moved to Vreeland, near Utrecht, and it is likely that she came to know the Utrecht Caravaggisti, notably Hendrick Ter Brugghen,* with whom she might also have studied. Her early works show his influence. Around 1629 she became Frans Hals's student in Haarlem, and she is probably the Judith Jansdr who is recorded as a witness to the baptism of one of Hals's children in 1631. She joined the Haarlem guild in 1633. It is thought that her Self-Portrait (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) was her presentation piece for the guild. In 1634 Leyster had her own studio, complete with students Davidt de Burry, Hendrick Jacobsz, and Willem Woutersz. It was over Woutersz that Leyster had her famous dispute with Hals regarding a stolen student. On 1 June 1636 Leyster married Jan Molenaer* in Heemstede. Over seventy documents take us through the birth of their five children, their homes, and their financial problems. Molenaer's unfortunate habit of not paying bills plagued Leyster for the rest of her life, which was spent between Heemstede, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. The couple is recorded in 1637 in Amsterdam, where their first child and three others were born. The family probably remained there until 1648, when they returned to Heemstede and nearby Haarlem, having purchased a farm in October of that year in Heemstede. Their fifth child, Constantijn (one of two who would outlive his parents), was born in Haarlem on 15 March 1650. Five years later the couple bought a house in Amsterdam, living there from May 1655 to November 1656, after which they rented it out. The income from this house and others in Haarlem, Heemstede, and Amsterdam helped support the family. After her marriage, Judith occasionally painted in a manner closer to her husband, as Mother Sewing with Children by Lamplight (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland) may indicate. That picture is clearly also a carryover from earlier meditative portrayals of women seen by lamplight, as Leyster painted in her sensitive image of The Proposition (dated 1631, The Hague, Mauritshuis). She, no doubt, also affected her husband's work. It has been suggested that the two artists worked on each other's paintings, since they often shared a studio and used the same models. Unfortunately, as family pressures grew, Leyster's output declined. We know of no certain pictures after 1652 and her husband's work also decreases in number in these years.
Perhaps it was fortunate for Judith Leyster that her father went bankrupt in 1625. The once wealthy Haarlem brewer was now forced to find other ways of providing for his nine children, and it may well have made better economic sense for him to have his artistically gifted daughter trained as a painter than to pay a dowry for her. Hitherto, no woman had been a member of the painters' guild in Haarlem, but the respected portrait painter Frans Pieter de Grebber employed his daughter Maria in his workshop, and it was probably there that the young Judith Leyster, who must have been roughly the same age as Maria, received her first training. More important to her in artistic terms was the influence of Frans Hals, whose virtuoso brushwork and bold compositions created a sensation in the northern Netherlands.
At the age of twenty-four Leyster is documented as a fully fledged painter in the list of members of the Haarlem guild. Like her male counterparts, she trained apprentices in her workshop. A few years previously the painters of Haarlem had made their guild regulations more rigorous so as to maintain the high quality of local art. Whoever wished to set up a workshop had to have trained for a minimum of three years with a recognized master and. following an additional apprenticeship, was required to submit a test piece. Leyster probably submitted the self-portrait reproduced here.
No previous woman artist had gazed so confidently at the viewer as Leyster does in this painting. Relaxed and self-assured, she leans back from the canvas on the easel, resting her arm casually on the back of the chair in such a way that it invades the space occupied by the spectator. The carefully calculated pose betrays not a trace of feminine modesty, none of the decorous restraint characteristic of self-portraits by her elder female colleagues, who always hold their elbows close to the body as befitted a woman of breeding. Leyster shows here that she had learned her lessons from Hals. Like him, she grants the image dynamism through a seemingly spontaneous turn of the body. The drapery reveals full command of Hals's type of bold, free brushwork, and the facial features are rendered with the delicate precision likewise associated with him. Contemporaries particularly admired the kind of illusionism represented by the artist's right hand, which appears almost tangibly close to the viewer. She grasps her brush with a lightness echoing that with which the young man in the painting on the easel holds the bow of his fiddle. These parallel gestures attest to the artist's skill, and educated viewers of the time may well have recognized in them a reference to the age-old dispute concerning the relative merits of painting and music. Moreover, the artist appears to be speaking, and this suggests a stock feature of writing on the visual arts since Antiquity: a human image was said to be so lifelike that it could almost be heard to speak.
This self-portrait was long thought to be a major painting by Hals. Leyster's pictures were often confused with Hals's in her own lifetime, and only gradually has her work been rescued from false attributions. The name Leyster means lodestar', and the artist frequently referred to this by adding a star to the monogram |L with which she signed her paintings.
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