LEYSTER, Judith

Leyster’s teacher is undocumented. Although she was one of Frans Hals’s most gifted followers, there is no documentary evidence that she was apprenticed to him, but visual evidence suggests she may have worked with him for a time in some capacity. She learned as much from Dirk Hals as from Frans Hals’s motifs and style.

All known evidence indicates that Leyster virtually stopped working as a professional painter after her marriage to Miense Molenaer in 1636. The loss to Dutch art caused by her abandonment of painting when she was in her late twenties is keenly felt when we confront her Young Flute Player of about 1635, which shows her at her best. The brushwork here has become personal, and the subtle gradations in value on the light-grey wall and the colouristic harmony of the boy’s red hat, olive-green jacket, violet trousers, and mottled green chair make an exquisite effect.

When looking at this little masterwork it is difficult to understand how Leyster’s name could have been forgotten for more than two centuries after it was painted.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 15 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonata in A Major for flute and cembalo obligato, BWV 1032

Judith Leyster is one of the very few women to have been accepted as a member of the Haarlem Guild of Painters. Although a contemporary historian described her as a leading light in art (punning on her name Leyster, which means “lodestar”) she remained unknown for a long time and her works were either believed lost, or were attributed to Frans Hals. She probably worked in his studio around 1630 and was also a friend of his family, for one year later she became godmother to Hals’ daughter Maria.

Like Hals at the same time, the young Leyster adopted the style of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, with their strong chiaroscuro modelling in the manner of Caravaggio. From the mid-1620, she concentrated more on vividly illuminated genre scenes, generally featuring half figures of merry musicians, gamblers and whores, strongly influenced by the painting of Terbrugghen and Honthorst.

While the Utrecht school of painters still rounded the surfaces of their objects smoothly between light and shade, Hals and his school adopted a broad, vibrant and independent brushstroke. Leyster’s work can be distinguished from that of Hals through her generally more discordant handling of colour, her sketchier treatment of hands, the wryly distorted smiles of her figures and her altogether flightier brushwork.

This jovial tippler (a “kannekijker”), smiling at the viewer as he lifts his empty German beer mug, is perhaps a rhetorician who played the role of the inebriate “Peeckelhaering”.

Leyster was extremely successful in her day as a portrait and genre specialist. Little is known about her early training but she was mentioned in about about Haarlem as being a local artist. In her early twenties she became the only female member of the Haarlem painters’ guild and soon had students of her own. Even though her work is closely identified with that of Hals, their relationship remains unclear. What is known is that she successfully sued Hals for a breach of ethics after he took on one of her students.

The lute-player is depicted di sotto in su, from a low vantage point. Singing a serenade he is accompanying himself on the lute. His extravagant red breeches with yellowish-gold and black stripes are slightly out of focus, creating the illusion that the viewer is looking up at him from close by.

Judith Leyster was one of the very few professional female painters of her time.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Ständchen (Serenade), Franz Liszt’s transcription

Although a number of works have been ascribed to Leyster since her rediscovery in the 1890s, the number attributable to her is small. Apart from a few Halsian portraits, a single still-life, and one or two watercolours of tulips, they are genre paintings. The earliest secure ones dated 1629 clearly show that from the start Frans Hals was a principal source of her themes and style. But Leyster did not work consistently in Frans Hals’s style. In the early thirties she began to make pictures of ‘modern figures’ that have a communality with young Miense Molenaer’s early works. They obviously had contact before their marriage; at this time they shared studio props and models. But more important for her than the early efforts of Molenaer were Dirk Hals’s small daylight and night scenes in interiors. She learned as much from Dirk as from Frans Hals’s motifs and style.

An intriguing painting of these years that is closely related to Dirk in composition and technique offers a view of an old man displaying coins to a dramatically lit young woman sewing by lamplight. His hand resting on her shoulder suggests that he is not offering payment for her labour as a seamstress. Is he making a proposition for sex which she virtuously ignores? This interpretation has been offered, and with good reason. The theme had been used by northern artists since the Renaissance, and was not rare with the Caravaggisti. To be sure, Leyster’s young woman has nothing in common with the readily seductable recipients of offers of purchased love depicted by earlier artists. Leyster’s young woman steadfastly remains occupied with her sewing, a model of domestic virtue. If this reading of the subject is accepted, the painting can be viewed as Leyster’s critical response to the salacious treatment of the subject by male artists who demean woman by representing them as sex objects exploited by men. It also would qualify the picture as Leyster’s only painting that treats a feminist issue. However, it also has been argued that the painting is not a precursor of feminist ideology, but a depiction of a Dutch tradition of offering a woman coins as an invitation to court, a subject that is also unambiguously represented by Leyster’s predecessors and contemporaries. Is Leyster’s old man a dishonourable seducer or a respectable suitor? The interpretation is open to question.

This painting is strongly reminiscent of Frans Hals’s depictions of children from this period, both in its diagonal composition and its exuberance. It was copied from a lost painting by Hals known from an engraving by Cornelis Danckerts.