最后一滴

Two men carouse late — one tips a tankard to drain the last drop, the other lights a pipe — and neither notices the third figure at their shoulder: a grinning skeleton holding up an hourglass, a skull and a burning candle. The costume marks the night as vastenavond, the eve of Lent, when people drank and feasted hard before weeks of fasting. Judith Leyster was one of the few women running her own workshop in Haarlem in these years, painting the merry drinkers and musicians made popular by Frans Hals, but giving them this darker moral edge. For a long time this very picture was taken for a Hals. Only in the early 1900s did someone spot her monogram, the letters 'JL' with a star, on the tankard and hand the work back to her.