Couple en goguette

Judith Leyster painted this merry pair in 1630, when she was about 21. She would go on to become one of the very few women of the Dutch Golden Age to enter a painters' guild and run her own workshop, and then her name simply disappeared. For over two centuries the picture passed as a Frans Hals, until 1892, when a London dealer who had bought it as a Hals found Leyster's monogram, a small star, beneath a forged Hals signature. The lawsuit that followed put her name back in the record. Look for that star. The couple are doing what her tavern scenes always do: he tunes a fiddle, she fills a glass, and the evening is clearly just getting started.