Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World

A professional woman artist struggling in a male-dominated trade, Dutch genre painter Judith Leyster (1609-1660) joined the artists' guild, ran her own workshop and competed with Franz Hals (c.1581-1666) and with her husband-to-be, painter Jan Molenaer (c.1610-1668). Her pictures of merrymakers, musicians and fun-loving children, reproduced here in 148 black-and-white and 45 color plates, recall Hals's dashing brushwork and insouciant spirit. Leyster also painted self-confident portraits, still lifes and allegories but her distinctive personal style crystallized in small, intimate candle-lit scenes. In this exhaustive catalogue of an exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, Welu, the museum's director, and Biesboer, curator of the Frans Hals museum in the Netherlands, lead a team of scholars in discussing not only Leyster's work and its iconography but also her career in the context of the Dutch art market. (Nov.)