The Judith Leyster picture currently housed in the Louvre was mistakenly attributed to Frans Hals for more than a century. The Carousing Couple (1630) depicts a loosely painted violinist having fun with a woman who tips her drink and smiles in his direction; these are the kind of merry people that the Dutch Golden Age artist was known to represent. This suggests that the misattribution wasn’t entirely incorrect. It was also precisely the kind of image created by Hals’s rival, a talented artist whose work was immediately recognizable because of her signature but who later faded into obscurity.
Leyster gave her artwork a distinctive monogram—a J and L crossed by a shooting star (or “leading star,” as her last name is pronounced), but if you didn’t see it or completely disregarded it, you might be misled. In fact, Leyster’s work was misattributed to Hals so frequently that this error had to be adjudicated in court. After being told The Carousing Couple was a Hals and paying 4,500 pounds for painting, British art dealer Thomas Lawrie sued the vendor after discovering Leyster’s monogram hidden beneath a bogus Hals signature. Hals finally rejected The Carousing Couple, Lawrie received a partial refund, and the following year a researcher published a ground-breaking study naming Leyster as the author of this oil on panel and six additional works as well. The piece of art was already a Leyster when it was included in the Louvre collection.
Since she is only known for 35 pieces, it is significant whenever one is discovered again. The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, recently purchased a long-lost Leyster, Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat (c. 1630), which belonged to LACMA for several decades until being sold (and vanished) in 1977.
What makes Judith Leyster significant, and who was she exactly? She produced genre scenes, still lifes, portraits, and botanical drawings during the Dutch Golden Age and was one of the very few professional woman artists. She was one of the first Dutch artists to use dramatic lighting in her nocturnal scenes, and her signature was the “worm’s-eye view” that depicted her subjects from below. Many of Leyster’s figures are positioned diagonally; she does this to break up the picture plane and evoke a dynamic sense of movement.
As researchers piece together Leyster’s presence in the Haarlem and Amsterdam scenes, there are still unanswered mysteries about her life, but this is what we do know.