Giovane ragazzo di profilo

In Haarlem in the early 1630s, a young painter named Judith Leyster was doing something almost no woman of her time could: running her own workshop with paying pupils. In 1633 she was admitted to the city's painters' guild as an independent master, one of very few women granted that status in the Dutch Republic. This is a small round panel, about the width of a hand, showing a boy in profile with flushed cheeks. Look at the loose strand of hair curling behind him. Leyster made it by scratching into the wet paint with the wooden end of her brush, a quick trick she used often. After her death many of her paintings were long mistaken for those of her famous neighbour, Frans Hals.