Episode Details

In 1893, a close look at a celebrated Frans Hals painting in the Louvre revealed a small monogram beneath the forged signature: an intertwined J and L with a five-pointed star. It belonged to Judith Leyster, a 17th-century Haarlem painter who was famous in her lifetime and then erased from history for more than two centuries. This episode reconstructs her rise in the hyper-competitive Dutch Golden Age art market, from a brewer's daughter to one of the first women admitted to the Guild of St. Luke as a master painter.

We examine her confident alla prima self-portrait in an expensive lace collar, her workshop with three male apprentices, and the 1635 lawsuit she brought against Hals himself over a poached student. We also look at how The Proposition subverted the tavern-scene genre, how dealers scraped away her star and painted in Hals's initials after her death, and why a mid-20th-century historian called the very same brushstrokes weak and fussy once he knew a woman held the brush. The story ends with her 2021 placement in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honor.

• Why the family brewery, the Leistar, explains her star monogram
• How guild membership gave a twenty-something woman the standing to sue Haarlem's most famous painter
• How the foot-warmer lighting in The Proposition dictates whose side the viewer takes
• Why her 1660 estate inventory listed her paintings as by the wife of Molenaer
• How economics and patriarchal bias fed each other to make forgery profitable