A show at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Judith Leyster (1609-60) would have been a political gesture had it been held thirty or so years ago. Now, in celebration of the artist’s four-hundredth birthday, it’s just a highly dramatic pleasure. Leyster’s genre pictures, from a fleetingly brief career in her native Haarlem, are among the slim pickings of important Western fine art by women prior to the nineteenth century. Feminist critics and scholars—fired by a famous 1971 essay by the art historian Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—seized on Leyster as a heroine perhaps second only to the terrific Italian Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652). Leyster was an apt candidate on biographical as well as on aesthetic grounds, illustrating the tall odds against women in art worlds of yore. Her story, like Gentileschi’s, features a legal case won to meagre satisfaction. Gentileschi was raped by a painter when she was eighteen, and, after she had been tortured to prove that she was telling the truth, he was convicted. Then he was let go. Mild in comparison, but galling nonetheless, was Leyster’s complaint to the painters’ guild of Haarlem (she was one of only two women granted membership in the entire seventeenth century) against her possible teacher Frans Hals, the city’s lion of painting, for stealing an assistant. Hals paid a small fine but kept the assistant. That was in 1635. A year later, at the age of twenty-six, Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, a successful but starkly inferior artist, and plunged into childbearing and family affairs. The little that remains of what she created thereafter lacks her previous, blazing originality. I knew Leyster was good, but the Washington show surprised me with its suggestions of the formation of a great artist. It left me indignant on her behalf.
She was the eighth child of a brewer and cloth-maker who took the family name from that of an eminent house he bought in Haarlem, in 1601. (In Dutch, leyster means “lodestar.”) In 1628, he went bankrupt. The family moved to the vicinity of Utrecht, where, on the evidence of her paintings, Leyster was exposed to the work of major artists, notably Hendrick ter Brugghen, who had adopted the revolutionary light and shadow of Caravaggio. She was soon back in Haarlem as a tyro entrepreneur, like nearly all the artists of Holland’s capitalism-pioneering Golden Age. Whether or not she studied under Hals, she speedily absorbed his innovative style—drawing with paint, essentially—while integrating lessons from the Utrecht Caravaggisti. The show begins with “Serenade” (1629), done when she was twenty. It’s an astonishing portrait of a fancily dressed lute player, rendered swiftly in raking, sonorous light. Leyster obliged the going market for scenes of tavern jollity—a specialty of Hals, who begs to be termed the master of the Golden Age’s happy hour. (Leyster was forgotten after her death until 1892, when it was discovered that the curious monogram on a painting of drinkers—“The Happy Couple,” from 1630—thought to be by Hals, was Leyster’s: a large “J,” a small “l,” and a star.) Her adherence to a hedonistic ethos can feel forced, against the grain of her nascent temperament. The slaphappy topers in “Merry Company” (circa 1630-31) are too merry by half, to my mind. More persuasive is the bite of the contemporaneous “The Last Drop,” in which two carousers are attended by a ferociously gleeful skeleton that cradles a lighted candle and a skull in one hand and holds an hourglass aloft with the other. But all such voguish themes strike me as baby fat on a sensibility in which sterner, more complex qualities were struggling to mature.
Three works riveted my attention in this small show, which has been beautifully installed by the curator of Northern Baroque painting, Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. Supporting exhibits include paintings by Hals and by Molenaer—whose irritating wedding picture “The Duet” (circa 1635-36) virtually displays Leyster as one item in an array of his possessions, along with a sleek dog and a luxuriantly set dinner table—and musical instruments akin to those she often depicted.
“Self-Portrait” (circa 1632-33) finds Leyster, dressed to the nines in a gown with sleeves of purple silk and a lace-trimmed linen collar, wielding brushes and palette at her easel. A not quite pretty but vibrant young woman, she turns toward the viewer, smiling and appearing to speak. On the canvas before her is a fiddler copied from “Merry Company,” advertising her genre specialty. The brush in her right hand points at the man’s crotch—a bawdy nuance, and to the taste of the time. X-rays have revealed that Leyster first pictured a portrait of a girl, probably herself. The literal self-effacement tells a melancholy tale, but the painting is a joy and, retroactively, a feminist icon. Owned by the National Gallery, it is frequently requested for loan. Even better is one of Leyster’s last surviving works, her masterpiece, “Young Flute Player” (circa 1635). A seated boy in a red hat and a ruff collar plays a flute while gazing, sidelong, into the source of the picture’s streaming, tender daylight. A violin and a recorder hang on the wall behind his chair. The work’s finely modulated browns and grays are breathtaking. They affect like essences of the flute’s sound—you practically hear them. Contemplating that work, I hankered for another dozen that would extend and develop its angelic style. But there’s just the one.
“The Proposition” (1631) is inexhaustibly interesting and disturbing. A ruddy, leering satyr of a man leans on a table beside a woman who is intently sewing, and offers her a handful of coins. He wears an un-Dutch fur hat, indicating that he is a foreigner and just in from the street. She wears a dazzling white smock over a voluminous blue-green skirt and rests her feet on a warming device, in which embers glow. (It’s a cold night in Haarlem.) The composition is oddly shoved to the left of the canvas, leaving empty space in which indefinite, almost Edvard Munch-like shadows lurk; it centers on a flaring oil lamp. She stolidly ignores the man, though one of his hands is draped on her right arm and the other, with the coins, is inches from her toiling fingers. Her intelligent face is painted with a crystalline precision that subtly cracks the convention of the picture’s then common genre, in which women were usually shown as more than receptive to temptation. The art historian Frima Fox Hofrichter, writing in the show’s brochure, notes that “to sew” was, as it remains, Dutch slang for sex, giving an unmistakable spin to an offer of money for a woman’s sewing. So the woman’s stony reluctance contests not only a powerful, socially superior man but the proverbial character of her situation. Indeed, the painting’s very style, sensuously brushed and robustly colored in a fashionable vein, sides with the likes of the lecher against those of his prey. The consequent emotional tension is like that of an anxiety dream from which you try to awake but cannot.
I can’t decide whether Leyster feels contemporary or makes me feel Old Dutch. In her work, social and sexual anxieties tingle with fire-alarm immediacy. Plainly, she had what it took to cope with those stresses in imagination and, knitting the bravura of Hals to an anticipation of the pregnant stillness of a Vermeer, to turn them to artistic account. Dutch genius of the seventeenth century found successive, disparate balance points in an engulfing tumult of worldly change. Leyster verged on one of her own. But the life it would have required, that of an independent woman, was unsustainable. In our last glimpse of her, she plays a dainty cittern in her husband’s “The Duet.” He, with a huge lute, is proudly ebullient. Her face is a mask of banal contentment. The boldly creative young artist, ripe with promise, has disappeared. ♦
