Judith Leyster Self Portrait National Gallery of Art

Artist

Judith Leyster

Boy Playing the Flute

Judith Leyster (Dutch, 1609–1660)
Oil on canvas, 620 x 730 cm
Early 1630s
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Gift 1871 Oskar II @Nationalmuseum

As of December 2019, Leyster’s painting Boy Playing the Flute is included in the CODART Canon as one of 100 Dutch/Flemish masterpieces (as voted on by CODART curator-members). Learn more about the painting at Google Arts & Culture | Nationalmuseum Stockholm

Self-Portrait

Judith Leyster (Dutch, 1609–1660)
Oil on canvas, 74.6 x 65.1 cm
c. 1630
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Learn more about the painting at the National Gallery of Art

The Artist

Judith Leyster, one of the first women to be admitted to the Saint Luke’s Guild of Haarlem, was a Dutch Golden Age painter of still lifes, portraits, and genre scenes. For almost 200 years after her death, her works were attributed either to Frans Hals or to her husband, artist Jan Miense Molenaer. Many were re-attributed to her upon the discovery of her signature, a distinctive monogram of her initials which incorporates a shooting star—a play on words with her name, since Leyster means “lode star” in Dutch. Most of her surviving works were painted in her young adulthood, before she married. But a self-portrait she painted later in life has recently come to light.

While some of her extant work is in private hands, a number of public art museums hold works by or attributed to Judith Leyster. These include the National Gallery of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis, the Currier Museum of Art, Nationalmuseum, the Frans Hals Museum, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, the Worcester Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Current and past exhibitions featuring Judith Leyster:

Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, September 26, 2025–January 11, 2026.

Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 at the Art Gallery of Ontario from March 30–July 1, 2024. The show was on previously (October 1, 2023–January 7, 2024) at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Ingenious Women: Women Artists and their Companions at Kunstmuseum Basel from March 2–June 30, 2024. The exhibition was previously hosted (October 14, 2023–January 28, 2024) at Bucerius Kunstforum in Hamburg.

Maestras: Women Artists at Arp Museum from February 25–June 16, 2024. The exhibition was previously hosted (October 31, 2023–February 4, 2024) at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

Books about Judith Leyster

Nonfiction

Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age, by Frima Fox Hofrichter (Davaco Publishers, 1989)

Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, edited by Pieter Biesboer and James A. Welu (Yale University Press, 1993)

Fiction

A Light of Her Own, by Carrie Callaghan (Amberjack Publishing, 2018)

Read more online about Judith Leyster at:

The Art Herstory blog:

Judith Leyster, Leading Star

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The National Gallery, Washington DC:

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