The Dutch painter Judith Leyster started her promising career with an apprenticeship, joined a master’s studio and signed up with the local artist’s guild so she could hang out her shingle and sell her work.
In 1634, she set up her own painting studio in Haarlem, near a competitor, Frans Hals. Her genre scenes, landscapes and portraits were admired for their psychological depth. A critic of Leyster’s time called her, “the true leading star in art.”
Then, Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, a less accomplished painter, and had five children. In addition to domestic chores, she managed her husband’s career and often finished his paintings, and her own work became smaller and simpler.
After Leyster died in 1660, she was largely forgotten. Some of her best paintings, like “The Carousing Couple,” now in the Louvre, and “Self-Portrait,” depicting the painter at work, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., were misattributed to Hals.
Recognition of these mistakes in the late-19th century led to a reappraisal of Leyster’s work two centuries after her death, but she has yet to become a household name.
Mention Dutch and Flemish old masters, and people still think of Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, who continue to overshadow the talented female painters who contributed to the visual culture of the Low Countries, present day Belgium and the Netherlands, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
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