Self-portrait

For about 250 years after her death, the paintings Judith Leyster signed were quietly credited to Frans Hals, the star of her home town of Haarlem. She had been something rare in the 1630s, a woman admitted as a master to the local painters' guild, with pupils of her own. Then she married a fellow painter, had children, and all but vanishes from the record, which is why people long assumed she stopped. This small self-portrait argues otherwise. It was only recognised as hers in 2016, and it shows her much older than the smiling young woman of her famous earlier one, seated at her work in blacks and browns, a palette in her hand, meeting your eye without a trace of a smile. It is dated 1653, seven years before she died.