A Serenata

Judith Leyster signed and dated this lute player in 1629, when she was about 20, one of the very first pictures she put her name to. She lit it in the manner then coming out of Utrecht, where painters had brought back the Roman trick of a single hidden light source. The glow rises from below the musician, throwing his plumed hat into a dark halo and tilting our view upward, as if we stand where the woman he serenades would be. For two centuries the picture hung under the name of Frans Hals. Only in the 1890s did scholars read the linked initials of her monogram and give it back to her. Four years after she painted it, she became the first woman admitted as a master to the Haarlem painters' guild.