Retrato circular de un niño con boina

Haarlem around 1630 had no court and a busy open picture market, and small panels sold quickly and cheaply. This is a tondo about 16 centimetres across, painted on oak when Judith Leyster was in her early twenties and a few years short of joining the city's painters' guild, one of the first women to do so. Work of this kind spent a long time filed under Frans Hals. Leyster's name dropped out of the record after she died in 1660 and came back only in 1893, when a painting the Louvre had bought as a Hals was cleaned and her monogram surfaced, a J and an L crossed by a star. The panel is listed both in the Frans Hals catalogue raisonné of 1974 and in the Leyster one of 1989. The Nationalmuseum acquired it in 1940.