合奏

Around 1633, in Haarlem, Judith Leyster became one of the first women admitted as a master to the local painters' guild, which meant she could run her own workshop and take on pupils. This trio of musicians dates from just about then. The three faces are probably real people. Scholars think the singer is Leyster herself, and the violinist may be Jan Miense Molenaer, the painter she would marry a few years later. She catches them mid-performance, the bow drawn across the strings, the songbook open. After her death her work was folded into the far more famous name of Frans Hals, and for two centuries these paintings hung under his signature. It took the rediscovery of her little monogram, a J and L crossed by a star, to give them back.