Judith Leyster

Judith Jans Leyster (1609-1660) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre works, portraits, and still lifes. Her work was highly regarded by her contemporaries, but largely forgotten after her death. Her entire oeuvre came to be attributed to Frans Hals or to her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer. In 1893, she was rediscovered and scholars began to attribute her works correctly.

Leyster was born in July 1609 in Haarlem to a local cloth maker who later became a brewer. She was the eighth child of Jan Willemsz Leyster. While the details of her training are uncertain, she was mentioned by contemporary Haarlem poet Samuel Ampzing in his book Beschrijvinge ende lof der stadt Haerlem (1628).

Some scholars speculate that Leyster pursued a career in painting to help support her family after her father's bankruptcy. She may have learned painting from Frans Pietersz de Grebber, who was running a respected workshop in Haarlem in the 1620s. During this time her family moved to the province of Utrecht, and she may have come into contact with some of the Utrecht Caravaggisti.

Leyster's first known signed works, Serenade and Jolly Topper, are dated 1629, when the artist was twenty years old. By 1633, she was admitted as a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some sources say she was the first woman registered by the Guild; others say it was Sara van Baalbergen in 1631. Dozens of other female artists may have been admitted to the Guild of St. Luke during the 17th century; however, since the medium in which they worked was often not listed, it is difficult to determine how many were painters. At the time, artists working in embroidery, pottery painting, metal and wood were included in guilds, and some were included for continuing the work of their deceased husbands.

Within two years of entering the Guild, Leyster had taken on three male apprentices. Records show that Leyster sued Frans Hals for accepting a student who left her workshop for his without first obtaining the Guild's permission. The student's mother paid Leyster four guilders in punitive damages, only half of what Leyster asked for, and Hals settled his part of the lawsuit by paying a three-guilder fine rather than return the apprentice. Leyster herself was fined for not having registered the apprentice with the Guild. Following her lawsuit with Frans Hals, Leyster's paintings received greater recognition.

In 1636, Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, a more prolific artist than herself who worked on similar subjects. In hopes of better economic prospects, the couple moved to Amsterdam, where Molenaer already had clients. They remained there for eleven years before returning to Heemstede in the Haarlem area. There, they shared a studio in a small house located in the present-day Groenendaal Park. Leyster and Molenaer had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood.

Most of Leyster's dated works were produced before her marriage and are dated between 1629 and 1635. There are few known pieces by her painted after 1635: two illustrations in a book about tulips from 1643, a portrait from 1652, and a still life from 1654 that was discovered in a private collection in the 21st century. Leyster may have worked collaboratively with her husband as well. She died in 1660, aged 50. She was buried at a farm just outside of Haarlem. None of her artwork was publicly displayed or attributed to her for close to 200 years. The fact that the inventory of her estate attributed many of the paintings to "the wife of Molenaer", not to Judith Leyster, may have contributed to the misattribution of her work to her husband.

Although well-known during her lifetime and esteemed by her contemporaries, Leyster and her work were largely forgotten after her death. She was rediscovered in 1893, when a painting admired for over a century as a work of Frans Hals was recognised as hers. After the realisation of Leyster's forgotten prominence and talent, she was posthumously critiqued to draw distinctions between her and Frans Hals, despite 200 years of her work being thought of as his.

In 1893 the Louvre found Leyster's monogram under the fabricated signature of Hals. It is not clear when the false signature was added. When the original signature was discovered, Thomas Lawrie sued the English firm, who in turn attempted to rescind their own purchase and get their money back from the art dealer.

In 1893 Cornelis Hofstede de Groot wrote the first article on Leyster. He attributed seven paintings to her, six of which are signed with her distinctive monogram 'JL*'. Art historians since then have often dismissed her as an imitator or follower of Hals, although this attitude changed somewhat in the late 20th century.

Apart from the lawsuit mentioned above, the nature of Leyster's professional relationship with Frans Hals is unclear; she may have been his student or else a friendly colleague. She may have been a witness at the baptism of Hals' daughter Maria in the early 1630s, since a "Judith Jansder" (meaning "daughter of Jan") was recorded as a witness, but there were other Judith Jansders in Haarlem. Some historians have asserted that Hals or his brother Dirck may have been Leyster's teacher, owing to the close similarities between their works.