Der fröhliche Zecher

Judith Leyster painted this jolly drinker in 1629, when she was about twenty. She worked in Haarlem in the loose, quick manner of Frans Hals, and a few years later became one of the very few women of her time admitted as a master to the local painters' guild, allowed to run her own workshop and take pupils. The man leans back with a tin tankard and a clay pipe, caught mid-laugh, the paint put down in fast, confident strokes. After she married and largely stopped painting, her name dropped out of view, and for centuries pictures like this were sold as the work of Hals or other men. Only in the 1890s, when her monogram was recognised again, did the paintings begin coming back to her.