Nearly 400 years ago, Judith Leyster, the daughter of a brewer in the Dutch city of Haarlem, made a name for herself as a painter.
She was one of the few professional woman artists of the period, and joined the local painter’s guild, a kind of early trade union, in 1633. But rather than staid portraits or religious iconography, she specialized in painting people in real situations, almost like a Baroque paparazzi.
“She mastered a style of quick impressions, capturing people in mid-pose as they are grimacing or laughing or having fun,” said Alan Chong, director of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester.
One of those quick impressions now hangs in the Currier’s permanent collection. Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat, a Leyster painting dated to around 1630, is the museum’s latest acquisition.
The painting is small, less than a foot across, done in oil on wood. The boy in the image is, frankly, something to behold.
“Many people have said the boy is kind of ugly,” Chong said while standing before the painting. “It is kind of strange.”
But he notes that capturing the awkward moments of the everyday was part of Leyster’s style, and a hallmark of genre painting popular among Dutch masters.
“Many of Judith Leyster’s figures have their head tilted back or seen at a weird angle, and their mouths are often open,” he said. “Something that is really happening, happening almost in real time, in an age before photography.”
It isn’t known who originally purchased this painting, but more than 300 years later, it showed up in Hollywood of all places, owned by Red Skelton, the early television comedian and host.
After Skelton, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art displayed the work, before selling it at auction in 1977.
Around that same time, Frima Fox Hofrichter, a doctoral student, took an interest in Leyster, in large part because she’d been ignored by most art historians.
“And that’s always been very exciting,” said Hofrichter, who is now a professor at the Pratt Institute in New York. “In fact, she is the perfect example of a woman lost to history.”
After Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, another celebrated Dutch painter, the two likely worked on paintings together under his name. Hofrichter says Leyster managed their business affairs, as well.
She was still painting intermittently while also giving birth to the couple’s five children, but after Leyster’s death at the age of 50, and following her husband’s death a few years later, her works were largely forgotten.
“Her paintings are listed as by the wife of the deceased, or by Mrs. Molenaer, her married name. Not Judith Leyster,” Hofrichter said.
It didn’t help that Leyster often didn’t sign her paintings, which was common for the period.
For 200 years, there was barely any mention of Leyster in historical records, but slowly, more and more works have been attributed to her. Today, there are about 25 to 30 known paintings, including a self-portrait that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
After its acquisition of Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat for an undisclosed price, the Currier chose to hang it beside a painting by Molenaer already in its permanent collection.
“I hate to say it, but the direct comparison between her work and his work…really shows her to be the superior painter,” Chong said. “A more dynamic, a more incisive painter, with better technique. And I think it is a good illustration of how these things work.”
