Leyster wasn’t a great artist — not when compared to Rembrandt, Vermeer and other select contemporaries — but she was very, very good. And before her marriage to the painter Jan Miense Molenaer she managed to have an independent career, no small feat for a 17th-century woman.
After training with accomplished painters thought to include Frans Hals, Leyster earned membership in the prestigious Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem. The Dutch artist had her own workshop, her own students and her own style, one that combined the spontaneity of Hals’s brushwork with a Caravaggist chiaroscuro.
What happened next is a familiar story: She married, had children and painted less and less frequently. Her art, unlike her husband’s, fell off the radar. Many of her paintings were attributed to other artists and weren’t properly identified until the 1890s.
The National Gallery show, like Leyster’s brief career, is a bit of a tease. It includes just 10 of her paintings, orchestrated around a splendid self-portrait from the permanent collection. The rest is context: a smattering of work by contemporaries, as well as 17th-century musical instruments that relate to some of the images.
The exhibition was organized by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the museum’s curator of northern Baroque painting, in consultation with the Leyster scholar Frima Fox Hofrichter. It occupies the Dutch Cabinet Galleries, an intimate set of rooms intended to evoke period domestic interiors. This installation suits the generally modest scale of Leyster’s art, though the symbolism is unfortunate. (The galleries were carved out of storage space adjacent to the Rembrandts.)
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