artist details

Judith Jans Leyster (1609 - 1660)

Dutch Baroque Era Painterress

Judith Jans Leyster (also Leijster) was a Dutch baroque era artist, who painted in a variety of genres, including genre subjects, portraits and even still lifes.

She was one of only two female members of the painters' guild in her native Haarlem, Judith Leyster was an independent Dutch artist with her own workshop and pupils.

Leyster was baptized, and presumed born, in Haarlem on the 28th of July 1609,as the eighth child of Jan Willemsz Leyster, a local brewer and clothmaker. While her training is uncertain, she was well known enough by her teens to be included in a book titled Beschrijvinge ende Lof der stad Haerlem in Holland by Samuel Ampzing about Haarlem, originally written in 1621, revised in 1626-27, and published in 1628.

By 1633, she was a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, one of only two women (the other was a house painter) who gained entrance into the group. Within two years of her entry into the guild, she had taken on three male apprentices. Records show that Leyster sued Frans Hals for stealing her student, who had left her workshop not three days after he had arrived.

The student's mother paid Leyster 4 guilders in punitive damages, only half of what Leyster asked for, and, instead of returning her apprentice, Hals settled the due by paying a 3 guilder fine.
In 1636, she married Jan Miense Molenaer, a more prolific, though less talented, artist. In hopes of better economic prospects, they moved to Amsterdam, where the art market was far more stable. They remained there for eleven years; they had five children, only two of which survived to adulthood. They eventually moved to Heemstede where in 1660 Leyster died at the age of 50.

Most of Leyster's dated works are from 1629-1635, which coincides with the period before she had children. After that there are only two known pieces, 2 illustrations in a book about tulips from 1643 and a portrait from 1652.
Her work was clearly influenced by the content and style of genre paintings created by the noted Haarlem artists Frans Hals and his brother Dirck. Like them, Leyster had a talent for painting lively scenes of people enjoying themselves in taverns, playing music, and the like. Such subjects were very popular with Holland's newly prosperous middle class, the principal buyers of contemporary Dutch art.

Although well known during her lifetime and esteemed by her contemporaries, Leyster and her work were largely forgotten after her death. Leyster's modern fame came in the late 19th century. The Louvre had purchased a Frans Hals only to find it had been in fact painted by Judith Leyster.

A dealer had changed the monogram that she used as a signature. Art historians since that period have often dismissed her as an imitator or follower of Hals, although this attitude has changed somewhat in the last few years.
The nature of Leyster's professional relationship with Hals is unclear; she might have been his student or else a friendly colleague.

There is confusion over whether she was present at the baptism of his daughter Maria sometime in the 1630s, since there was in fact a Judith Jans there, but there were many Judith Jans in Haarlem. There is no documented evidence of Judith Leyster's apprenticeship under Frans Hals, even though much of Leyster's work, such as the Merry Drinker from 1629 (now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam), has a very strong resemblance to

The Jolly Drinker of 1627-28 by Hals (also in the Rijksmuseum). Some historians have asserted that Hals must have been Leyster's teacher by the uncanny resemblance between the two rivals.
Leyster was particularly innovative in her domestic genre scenes. In them, she creates quiet scenes of women at home, which were not popular in Holland until the 1650s.

Much of her other work was similar in nature to that of many of her contemporaries, such as Hals, Ultrecht Caravagisti, Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Jan Steen; such genre paintings, generally of taverns and other scenes of entertainment, catered to the tastes and interests of a growing segment of the Dutch middle class.

Her monogram includes a star, a play on 'Ley/ster' (lode star). She died in Heemstede, the Netherlands in 1660.