Boy playing the Flute

Judith Leyster painted this in Haarlem in the early 1630s, at a time when a woman running her own painting workshop was almost unheard of; she was one of the very few women admitted to the local painters' guild, and she took on pupils of her own. The boy tilts back on a broken chair, eyes lifted, lost in the sound of his flute, a recorder and a violin hung on the wall behind him. It may be an image of Hearing, one of the five senses. For most of its life the picture was credited to the bigger local name, Frans Hals, and Leyster's authorship was only recognised in 1893, when a scholar spotted her monogram, a J and an L threaded through a star.