Attributed to Frans Hals

In 1892 a British dealer, Thomas Lawrie, bought a lively picture of a fiddler and a laughing woman, sold to him as a Frans Hals. He then found another mark beneath the Hals signature, a monogram of J and L crossed by a star, and took the seller to court. The monogram belonged to Judith Leyster, a Haarlem painter who worked in a manner close to Hals, and in 1893 the scholar Cornelis Hofstede de Groot published the first study of her work. The painting, The Carousing Couple, now hangs in the Louvre under her name.

Attributed to Frans Hals marks a picture a museum believes is his without being able to prove it. His quick, open brushwork was learned by pupils and by several of his sons, who also became painters, and later admirers imitated it, so the boundary of his work keeps being redrawn. In 2016 Sotheby's refunded a buyer who had paid 10 million dollars for a portrait sold privately as a Hals, after pigment analysis showed it could not have been painted in his lifetime.