Una partida de cartas

Judith Leyster painted this in 1633, the same year she was admitted as a master to the painters' guild in Haarlem, one of very few women in the Dutch Republic allowed to run her own workshop and take pupils. The picture is pure Haarlem entertainment, four people crowded around a card game, caught mid-move, the light falling sharply on their faces and hands. It is close in spirit to Frans Hals, who worked in the same town, and for a long time paintings like this were simply assumed to be his. Leyster signed with a small monogram shaped like a star, a play on her name, which sounds like the Dutch words for a leading star. Only in the late 1800s did scholars begin giving her back the works that had quietly been sold as Hals.