陽気な三人組

In the Haarlem of the early 1630s, a woman running her own painting workshop was almost unheard of, yet Judith Leyster did exactly that, becoming one of the first women admitted as a master to the city's painters' guild. She was barely into her twenties when she painted this rowdy scene of revellers, one of them lifting his glass straight at us as if to pull us into the party. For a long time the picture wasn't even hers. Its confident, loose brushwork looked so much like that of Frans Hals, the great Haarlem portraitist, that it passed as his work until 1903, when Leyster's own signature was recognised and the painting was returned to her.