Self-Portrait
This self-portrait shows the artist at her easel, turning in mid-stroke, with brush in hand to face the viewer. The diagonal of her torso as she turns, the play of light suggesting movement in her lace collar and her sleeve, and her facial expression, lips open as if beginning to smile, create a sense of lively immediacy. On the easel to the right, an animated musician dressed in blue, is playing a violin and singing along. The painting within a painting further emphasizes Leyster's self-presentation as a masterful painter of genre works. Here she innovatively compares the arts of music and painting in the echoing diagonals of the musician's bow and the painter's brush, while her use of cropping makes the painting seem almost as spontaneous as a snapshot.
Leyster's treatment here is a noted innovation of self-portraiture as, in effect, she is marketing her brand, as the musician depicted here is copied from her most popular work The Happy Couple (1630). At the same time, X-rays have shown that painting on the easel was originally a girl's portrait, probably a self-portrait, and as art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, "the literal self-effacement tells a melancholy tale, but the painting is a joy and, retroactively, a feminist icon." The artist's brush points at the musician's crotch, a bawdy allusion common to the time. Beneath Leyster's vibrant surfaces, Schjeldahl notes, "social and sexual anxieties tingle with fire-alarm immediacy."
In the years following her death, Leyster's work disappeared, as her works were attributed to Frans Hals, or to her husband, the painter Jan Miense Molenaer. In 1893 the Louvre purchased The Happy Couple (1630), believing it to be a work of Hals, only to discover Leyster's signature and trademark, a star symbol playing upon the meaning of her last name "lodestar." Though the work had been much praised by critics when attributed to Hals, subsequently they demoted the work for its "weakness." Feminist art scholars, such as Linda Nochlin, and artists like the Guerrilla Girls, beginning in the 1970s, launched a revival of interest in Leyster's work.
