Amor desigual

Judith Leyster painted this around 1631, one of the few women running her own workshop in the Dutch Republic at the time. It takes up a popular subject, the ill-matched couple, but turns it around. Usually a man presses money on a young woman. Here an older woman holds out a coin purse and a ring to a young man playing the lute, who leans away. For a long time nobody could see her. When the picture was catalogued in 1937 the woman had been painted over entirely, leaving the lute player alone, and she was only uncovered during a cleaning after the Second World War. Leyster's own name had likewise vanished for centuries, her work long credited to Frans Hals. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome.