Self-Fashioning and Agency in the Portraits of Women Artists: The 1630 "Self-Portrait" of Judith Leyster.

By Eden Binjaku

Much progress has been made in the field of art history since Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists? — which sparked the development of feminist art theory and continues to inspire scholars and curators. More recently, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a traveling exhibition titled “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800,” which featured art objects displaying the impact of women on early modern European Visual culture.

At the end of the show, you are met with the last painting: a jovial, confident, and relaxed woman in fine clothes — looking at the viewer, her lips-parted, as she sits before an easel upon which she paints a merry violin player. The technique mirrors the tone of the subject, rendered in confident and lively brushstrokes. This is Judith Leyster’s Self-Portrait of 1630 (fig. 1).

Figure 1: Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1630, oil on canvas. 74.6 x 65.1cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The process of visual ‘self-fashioning’ in Leyster’s Self-Portrait is particularly interesting, and speaks to a broader theme of identity constructions within the work of early modern women artists. Functioning as an invitation to a discourse on agency, and the strategies women painters used to displace or engage with a male-dominated canon and visual language, Leyster asserts her technical skill and artistic status as a minority within in a gendered field. With this in mind, we must also consider that Judith Leyster was an exception among women of her era; an accepted Dutch Golden Age painter, she did receive institutional success and praise in her lifetime. She likely recieved academic training since childhood, and worked as a workshop assistant of Dirk Hals, brother of Frans Hals, forming a plethora of invaluable contacts early in her career. By the age of 23-24, in 1633, Leyster was one of two women to ever be accepted in the exclusive Haarlem’s Saint Lucas Guild, working among other renowned Dutch painters. She established a workshop and produced several genre scenes, her brief career marked by a majority of works intended for sale on the market. In 1648, renowned writer and poet Theodorus Schrevelius called her “the true Leading star in art” (a pun of her name) and praised her ability to rival that of her male contemporaries. It was upon her marriage to a fellow artist colleague that her artistic production waned, and she took to financially managing an art dealership of her husband and other artists’s works. In subsequent centuries she fell into obscurity and many of her works were attributed to Frans Hals and his circle. Though the stylistic and iconographic similarities are apparent, there is no conclusive evidence that she ever directly studied under him. However, relatively recent twentieth and twenty-first century efforts of feminist art historians to uncover early women painters led to her rediscovery and technical studies reattributing several works on a larger scale.  

Among such corrections was Leyster’s 1630 Self-Portrait, formerly attributed to Frans Hals, as a portrait of his daughter, then as Frans Hals’s portrait of Leyster – then, a collaboration Hals and Leyster, until finally in 1949 upon acquisition of the National Gallery, Leyster receieved full recognition as its sole author. The figure on the easel has been identified as a study from another of her pieces, Merry Company (1630). Additional confirmation was attained with the use of infrared x-rays in 1979 (fig. 2), which noted in Hofrichter’s monograph (provided by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.) overpainted alterations to Leyster’s pose, in addition to a portrait of a young girl on the canvas instead of the musician. This confirmed the attribution of the work on the grounds that one would not depict an artist painting another’s work, and that the previous portrait of a young girl in the canvas would be a portrait within a portrait, which reinforces the artist’s female identity and display of professional agency.

Figure 2: Infrared photograph of Judith Leyster’s Self-Portrait, 1630, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, courtesy of the conservation lab.

Though her lively style is unusually informal for an artist’s portrait, her fine dress conforms to the pictorial tradition of artist’s elevating their status, seeking to represent painting as a liberal art, rather than an artisanal craft. Hofrichter further sees evidence of Utrecht and Mannerist training references, and Haarlem painting traditions. Further, the scholar asserts that Leyster’s dress is compared to that of a patron of art, while her open mouth engages with the connection of poetry to art. The possibility of this work having been submitted to the Guild as a reception piece would explain the complex treatment of art genres and self-fashioning that Leyster employs. 

Where previous monographic exhibitions of Leyster controversially contextualised her works in relation to her male contemporaries, such as the 1993 exhibition by the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem, entitled “Schilderes in een mannenwereld” [[female] painter in a man’s world], critics criticised the unecessarily large quantity of ‘supporting’ works by male artists having been hung alongside her show. Presently, scholars have attempted to shift away from the limitations of such a reading. Compositionally, Cynthia Kortenhorst-von Bogendorf Rupprath has argued for Leyster’s awareness of the successful careers of other female artists too, positing similarities with Belgian artists Katharina van Hemessen, and Cremonese artist Sofonisba Anguissola whose works preceed Leyster’s. In composing her Self-Portrait, she can be seen as having adopted some characteristics of their self-portraits (from 1546 and 1554 respectively) yet, conversely, Leyster chooses to place herself on the left side of the composition, which is significant in its compositional association with male artists, serving to raise her status as a professional artist and assert her painterly skill as a female equal.

Later exhibitions such as the 2009 monographic by the National Gallery of Art, Washington titled “Reasons to Look Back: Judith Leyster, 1609-1660,” curated by Professor Hofrichter and Arthur K. Wheelock, partially responded to the 1993 retrospective, itself achieveing mixed reviews. It addressed the previous show’s distributions of a few works as “circle of Hals” and the overwhelming presence of works by other artists, instead focusing on a corpus of artworks and objects related to the visual world the Judith Leyster was situated in. This show was, however, critiqued for its lack of accompanying critical essays - weakened in its stand without written study of Leyster’s formal vocabulary in relation to the Haarlem art scene. The most recent traveling art exhibition, “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800” which I had the opportunity to see in Toronto, again restates Leyster - particularly her Self-Portrait - framed within another context, that of “overlooked” women artists. A combination of a relatively small amount of detailed study on Leyster, especially in English, and limited exhibitions that engage with her, Judith Leyster’s Self-Portrait is an example which emphasises the necessity for address of a core art historical issue: that of priositising equal scholarship on women artists. There is more to be asked about the complexity of her self-portrait, and themes of self-representation on a more focused scale. 

For example, Leyster’s signature monogram (fig. 3), which incorporated her initials with a star, echoes the praise of her talents; reflecting her confident awareness of her skill, as uncovered by Hofstede de Groot.  Many of her signatures have been uncovered in previously misattributed works, where conservators and dealers had altered the monogram to resemble the initials of more profitable artists in the modern market such as Frans Hals.

Figure 3: Judith Leyster’s monogram.  Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washinton.

Artist signatures can be seen, in this light, as aspects of their self-fashioning, much like a miniature Self-Portrait. This sense of agency is epitomized in Leyster’s 1630 Self-Portrait. Not only does she represent herself as a woman with rising status, but as a confident artist - referring boldly to her versatile skill set in portraiture, genre-painting expressed in a self-developed, lively, experimental technique. Leyster posessed agency over her own representation, fashioned to her liking, and in communicating her skills within the painting through deft reference to another piece within her body of work on the canvas. In this manner, we see several ways in which she leaves her ‘signature’ in every detail of the work, wielding the ability to communicate her abilities and complex engagement with art and her contemporary art market.        

Bibliography:

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Gratama, Gerrit David. "Het Portret van Judith Leyster door Frans Hals." Oud Holland, no. 47 (1930): 71-75.

Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age. Davaco, 1989.

Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World by James E. Welu, Pieter Biesboer.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2 (1995): 44–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1358576. Accessed 2 Nov. 2024.

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