Girl power: National Gallery’s Judith Leyster exhibit showcases portraits

The 17th century was a man’s man’s man’s world. But the Dutch painter Judith Leyster was so extraordinary that she achieved recognition for her mastery of genre scenes and portraits in her own time. She most likely trained under the Dutch master Frans Hals, and most certainly earned acceptance to Haarlem’s exclusive Guild of St. Luke in 1633. Once Leyster married fellow painter Jan Miense Molenaer two years later and became pregnant with the first of their three children, her artistic output dropped. So did her reputation, eventually, with many of her roughly 20 known paintings mistakenly regarded as the work of others for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1890s, scholars finally restored to her posthumously the credit and prestige she’d enjoyed in her prime.

That National Gallery of Art is offering her yet another reappraisal. The quadcentenntial birthday bash Judith Leyster 1609-1660 includes 10 Leyster paintings. The most iconic is her remarkable 1632-33 self-portrait from the gallery’s permanent collection, wherein the artist leans back from her easel and looks over her shoulder, as though welcoming us into her studio. (She’s also wearing an ornate collar she’d probably never have worn to paint. Maybe she dressed up to receive company.)

This, says Frima Fox Hofrichter, who helped the gallery’s Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. organize the show, was most probably her “master’s piece” — the painting she gave to the guild upon her admission. (And yes, that is from whence the term “masterpiece” was derived.) Despite Leyster’s technical faculty, it was her gift for storytelling that has made her paintings immortal, even when they weren’t properly credited.

Works like “The Proposition” and “Merry Company,” both from around 1631, are prime specimens of her knack for compressed narrative, capturing funny, fleeting, human moments. The latter depicts a group of high-spirited young fellows in a tavern, including the violinist Leyster is painting in her self-portrait. The former shows a man interrupting a seamstress at her candlelit labors. The “Proposition” he’s making in the scene is likely just what you think it is. The Dutch verb for “to sew” was a double entendre of this era, one modern English-speakers might liken more closely to “to sow.” But you don’t need to be linguist to understand this exchange — Leyster put it all on canvas, on the man’s lecherous face.

Leyster’s own works comprise only part of the exhibit. The show features 20 other pieces by her contemporaries, including Molenaer and her probable instructor, Hals. While echoes of Hals’ untamed brushwork can clearly be seen in Leyster’s canvases, there is evidence the influence might have gone both ways: Later in Leyster’s career, Hals was penalized for copying the work of one of Leyster’s assistants.

Also included are some of the period musical instruments depicted in paintings such as “Young Flute Player” and “The Serenade.” Music was a key theme in Leyster’s work. “Young Flute Player” shows two other instruments, a violin and a recorder, hanging on the wall behind the performer, much as they’re arrayed the Dutch Cabinet Gallery that houses the exhibit. This gives a pleasing dimensionality to the show.

Leyster’s love of music is evident from the smile she wears in “Concert,” a painting wherein she shows herself seated between two musicians. It’s her party, after all, and what’s a birthday party without song?