Judith Leyster

In 1893 the Louvre took a fresh look at a lively little painting it had bought as a Frans Hals, and found, hidden under a false Hals signature, a small monogram: the letters JL threaded through a shooting star. The star was a pun. Judith Leyster's family name meant lodestar, the guiding star, and she had signed her work with it more than 250 years earlier.

In her own time she had been no secret. One of very few women admitted as a master to the painters' guild in Haarlem, she ran a workshop, took on apprentices, and painted confident, warm scenes of people making music, laughing, or caught by candlelight. She even took the older Frans Hals to the guild over an apprentice who left her studio for his.

Then she married a fellow painter, her output fell away, and after her death in 1660 her name faded so completely that her pictures were quietly reassigned to Hals or to her husband. The star hidden under the false signature began putting that right, and today the paintings hang again under her own name.