The one that first drew my attention is a painting called Self-Portrait by Judith Leyster. It's featured in an article about the Guild of St. Luke, a 17th-century confederation of Low Countries artists; Leyster, a protégé of Frans Hals, was the first female member of its Haarlem contingent.The painting in question is from around 1630 and currently hangs in the National Gallery of Art. Interestingly it's her sole formal self-portrait (and though it feels casual it is a formal self-portrait: Wikipedia extraneously notes that Leyster "surely did not dress like this to paint"), but not the only time she appears in her own works. She also painted herself into a gathering of musicians, along with her husband and a friend. I'm always intrigued by real, everyday people ending up in paintings meant to depict something else, like the director's friends in the next booth over in a movie diner. My aunt is a painter, and I've seen the brush-stroke this process first-hand: one of the murals she worked on ended up including her husband as an apostle. My uncle's long hard life as a farmer, though, forced her to use someone else to model the apostle's uncallused hands.
In the self-portrait, I'm intrigued by the chair, and I wish the palette showed her oils a little more clearly. But most of all I'm interested in the fiddler — the subject of the painting she's painting in her painting of her painting.
If Leyster liked to paint real people, then who is this happy fellow? It's not a painting on its own, but rather a study of the figure on the right in "Merry Company", a painting from the same year.
What does she want to say about herself by having a fiddler serenade her from her canvas as she poses for herself? According to the NGA conservation notes, infrared reflectography reveals that the painting on the easel was original a portrait of a woman in profile. She changed her mind and painted over it with the violinist, as if reconsidering the tone of her self-portrait. The self-portrait, the Art Wolf suggests, may have been her proof to the Guild that she could handle both portraiture and genre scenes; the fiddler might have made the self-portrait a better portfolio item. But this isn't just about providing an impressive calling card.
A self-portrait of a painter painting offers a rare opportunity to watch a painter interacting with her creations. On their own, a painter's creations are isolated, distinct, and static. But here, you can entertain the idea that she's conjuring a jaunty man to share his cheer with her. Placing herself in the painting seems like a literal act, as if his world is where she wants to be. Here, she's clearly not just enjoying the fiddler; she is the maker. The other painting I mentioned takes her a step further, allowing her to pass through the looking glass and sing with her musicians.
Look at this man. The violinist is not only happy, he's relaxed. He's at peace. His costume, loose and comfortable, echoes his state of mind. In this moment, playing his fiddle, he has no cares; this moment is about delighting in making music and sharing it with whoever's listening. It's easy to depict happiness with a manic edge, or as the artificial and ephemeral product of inebriation or situation, like a returning family member or the halloo of god. But this — this is the kind of happy I want to be, simple and pure, and yet active. Vivacious is a good word: the happiness that comes from living life. And — perhaps most importantly — he's sharing that happiness, emanating it: he has a nimbus of lighter-colored gold around his head. I think that says a great deal about Leyster's conception of the purpose of art, as in part a means of propagating the joy felt by the creator as she creates.
The current scholarship of Leyster's self-portrait is one of the successes of art history. In the 19th century this painting was thought to be a painting by Hals of his daughter. A 1918 article called "Judith Leyster, a Female Frans Hals" by Frieda van Emden muses to us from a bygone era: "As she was a woman, the first question asked will probably be: 'Was she good looking'? If she was, certainly she was not vain, for no self-portrait of her is known," even though most of her contemporaries produced one. So: does that mean the men were all vain, or is that a female trait, Ms. van Emden? And now that a self-portrait is known, does that mean she was vain?
The Louvre also bought a Leyster thinking it was a Hals. Leyster remained one of the lesser known Dutch masters into the 20th century, in part because she gave up painting about five years after this work in order to manager the career of her husband, also a painter of the same school. Only in the last few decades has Leyster begun to emerge from Hals's shadow. Looking at Leyster's work alongside Hals's, though Hals was clearly a strong influence on her, it seems to my untrained eye that Leyster was more particularly interested in manifesting on canvas moments of joy and peace.
