Judith Leyster

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Judith Leyster


(Picture: cleoeurope.org)

2015 – a Judith Leyster Year

The UNESCO has declared the year of 2015 to be the ›International Year of Light and of Light-based Technologies‹. But the year of 2015 is also a Judith Leyster year. Judith Leyster (1609-1660), the Dutch Paintress? Isn’t the author able to work with numbers? (What about a ›back to math basics year‹?) There is not exactly a centenary or the like (the only legitimate reason to go back and to think about an artist) to be found here.
Oh, you surfers on the surface of things. The year of 2015 is indeed a Judith Leyster year. Because a brand new article in a brand new volume of a very traditional, if not to say old-fashioned art encyclopaedia has appeared in print (Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, volume 84, p. 325-327). Oh, you surfers on the surface of things, you have to dig deeper. Because here, in this brand new article (by Pieter Biesboer) you get a quite good overview on Judith Leyster studies. And as everyone knows the artist Judith Leyster has only become visible as an artistic personality in 1893. More precise, one did recall the artist Judith Leyster after having rediscovered her then (or from then on).

And this rediscovery, this reentering into visibility, causes us now to ask some questions. And these questions can only come up, if we are able to look back. And our looking back must be informed. For example by brand new articles in very old-fashioned encyclopaedias.

What I am interested in here is only to touch upon some of the questions raised by the rediscovery of Judith Leyster in the late 19th and 20th century. Upon which we are, if we may say so, looking back. And these questions, that make sense in the context of a history of perception, are for example the following ones:

1) Why showed (male) connoisseurs not being able to distinguish the artistic personality and the style of Judith Leyster from, for example, Frans Hals, before 1893? (Did they also show unwilling?)

2) What exactly are, secondly, the distinguishing features? After we know, have been reminded of the existence, of Judith Leyster? (And don’t come, by the way, with trivia such as ›It’s the monogram, stupid‹)

3) Do such properties indeed exist (since some scholars now have questioned that a distinctive artistic personality indeed does show in clearly distinguishable properties)? (And on what level (technical, representational, intellectual, human) we have to look for such properties at all?)

4) What might be the role of what one may call the ›prepared eye‹ in all this? Did one not see (before 1893) because one had not been prepared to see, not been informed that there might be a dissimulated artistic personality within the oeuvre of Frans Hals? And after 1893: Did one see distinctive properties because there had to be such properties?

5) Were ideologies involved, and if yes which ones (misogynic, feminist)?

6) Why is, in the context of art history, the most important (what may be here: the exact distinctive features) often little spoken of? Because this work, the putting together of what people have regarded the distinctive features of works by Judith Leyster in the last hundredandsomething years or so has still to be done (and this includes a going into the Frans Hals oeuvre catalogues etc.).

Although the before mentioned article on Judith Leyster has made a beginning. And may be regarded as a nice contribution to the year of light/the year of Judith Leyster.

(PS: Of course also the encyclopaedic articles by Frima Fox Hofrichter (Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, volume 19; the ›Leather to Macho‹ volume) and by James A. Welu (Dictionary of Women Artists) serve us as references as well.)

Judith Leyster herself might have seen all this more relaxed
(picture: codart.nl)

…and Frans Hals also (or even more so…?)

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