Portrait d'une femme inconnue

In 1892 a London dealer paid 4,500 pounds for a Dutch picture of a carousing couple sold to him as a Frans Hals. Cleaning it turned up a different mark under the faked Hals signature, a J and an L crossed by a star, and the case ended in court the following year. The star was a pun on a name: Leyster, lodestar. Paintings began coming back to her after that, half a dozen at once, and the confusion between the two hands is why a picture like this one, a woman looking out from a plain dark ground, spent so long under somebody else's name. It hangs now in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the town where both of them worked.