Autorretrato

Leyster was one of very few women admitted as a master to a Dutch painters' guild in the 1600s, joining the ranks in Haarlem around the time she made this. She shows herself turning from her easel as if you had just walked in, mouth open mid-sentence, brush and palette in hand, wearing a fine collar she would never really paint in. On the canvas within the canvas is a laughing fiddler lifted from one of her own lively genre scenes. For centuries her work was mistaken for that of Frans Hals, and this very picture once passed under his name. Her monogram, a J and an L threaded through a star, puns on her surname, which carries the sense of a lodestar.