Judith Leyster, Golden Age Painter

Judith Leyster (died 10 February 1660)

Unlike many early-modern women artists, Judith Leyster did not follow in her father or brother's footsteps, training in their studios. (See, for example, two we have already noted, Elisabetta Sirani and Maria Sibylla Merian.) How and why Leyster became an artist and where she received her training are unknown.

However she learned her craft, she had enough of a reputation by 1627 to be mentioned in a description of the city of her birth, Harlaam, but her first known, signed painting is dated to 1629. By 1633, she was a member of the Harlaam Guild of St. Luke, the first female painter registered as a member of the guild. Records show that Leyster herself took on the training of apprentices and, along with her husband, another painter, operated a studio in Harlaam and in Amsterdam.

Judith Leyster, Self Portrait (1633), perhaps
her submission piece to the Harlaam Guild

The number of paintings attributed to Leyster ranges from 20 to 35. Almost all of her work was produced between 1629 and 1636, the date of her marriage. Only a few works can be dated after her marriage--during the time when she had five children. 

The lovely Blompotje (Flowers in a Vase), below, was recently identified as a work by Leyster, dated to 1654. According to art historian Frima Fox Hofrichter, 

Many art historians have often assumed that Judith Leyster gave up painting upon her marriage. With the discovery of the flower still life and its date of 1654, we now have documentation that she continued her career as a painter. It is likely that Leyster moved to still-lives and botanical studies after her marriage, perhaps to split the market with her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer.

You might be interested in this wonderful book on Leyster and her work by Pieter Biesboer and James Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World. And of course there is Frima Fox Hofrichter's Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland's Golden Age. (Yikes! It's very expensive--interlibrary loan?)

Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race contains an excellent discussion and analysis of Leyster, about whose life and work she notes: "The most remarkable case of a disappearing oeuvre (until the next one comes along) is probably that of Judith Leyster." Leyster's name and knowledge of her work may have begun to be forgotten or "eclipsed" as early as the date of her marriage; her work was also misattributed to the painter Franz Hals, among others, despite the fact that Leyster signed her work. As Greer notes, "If Judith Leyster had not been in the habit of signing her work with the monogram JL attached to a star, . . . her works might never have been reattributed to her" (136).

Blompotje [Flowers in a Vase] (1654), 
recently identified as a work
by Judith Leyster

Beatrice Cenci: Murder and Memory

Beatrice Cenci (born 6 February 1577)

In 1599, the twenty-two-year-old Beatrice Cenci was executed in Rome. Along with her stepmother, she was beheaded for her involvement in the murder of her father, Francesco Cenci; her elder brother was executed by quartering (another brother was forced to witness the execution of his family, but he was too young to be executed).

A "portrait" of Beatrice Cenci,
attributed to Elisabetta Sirani

There is no dispute about what had led to Francesco Cenci's murder by members of his own family--he was a violent man who had long brutalized the members of his household. His behavior was well known--he had been investigated, arrested, tried, and even convicted for various crimes of sexual violence.

In 1595, Francesco Cenci had left Rome, taking his second wife, Lucrezia, and Beatrice to a remote castle north of Rome, where he imprisoned the two women. 

Evidence shows that, by 1597, the two women were plotting against Francesco--but their plan was to escape from him, not to murder him. Beatrice desperately appealed for help to her brother and other influential relatives, detailing the women's plight, but her father learned of her accusations. His response was to whip Beatrice--and there is some evidence that he may also have raped her.

While the exact depth of Francesco Cenci's depravity is subject to debate, Beatrice's role in the conspiracy to murder her father is clear. At first she denied her guilt, a denial she persisted in even after torture. But eventually she confessed, as did her stepmother and brothers. Despite protest by the people of Rome, and an appeal for mercy to Pope Clement VII, the executions were carried out on 11 September 1599.

And then the "legend" of Beatrice Cenci began. Her life--and death--have been the subject of many retellings, most famously in Percy Bysshe Shelley's nineteenth-century verse drama The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts. (To read Shelley's play, click here.) There are lyric poems, novels, operas, and films. 

For those interested in the story of Beatrice Cenci, I recommend Belinda Jack's Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.

The origins of the image of Beatrice Cenci, reproduced above, are mysterious, and Jack notes that it wasn't until "some point" in the eighteenth century that this "portrait 'became' Beatrice." The portrait was at once time attributed to Guido Reni (1575-1642), but is now widely believed to have been painted by Elisabetta Sirani. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

This plaque in Rome commemorates Beatrice Cenci's death: "From here, where the prison of Corte Savella once stood, on 11 September 1599 Beatrice Cenci was taken to the scaffold, an exemplary victim of an unjust justice."

Elisabetta Sirani: Against the Odds--A Woman Artist in Seventeenth-Century Bologna

Elisabetta Sirani (born 8 January 1638)

Trained by her father, who desperately needed the money she could earn, the painter Elisabetta Sirani was supporting her family by the time she was sixteen--and dead by the time she was twenty-seven. (She died in the city of her birth, Bologna, on 28 August 1665.)

In a little more than a decade, she produced an impressive body of work, some 200 paintings and drawings, although as Germaine Greer has noted, "No attempt to present a catalogue raisonné of her whole oeuvre, notwithstanding the great help offered by her own list . . . , has ever been made."

Elisabetta Siran, self-portrait
1658

In addition to her own work, Sirani is also credited with having opened her studio to female pupils. Several of her students went on to professional careers of their own, including Sirani's two younger sisters, Anna Maria Sirani and Barbara Sirani. Greer adds that, after Sirani's death, "her example continued to inspire the young women of Bologna."

Among her pupils who continued their studies are the painters Veronica Franchi, Caterina Mongardi, Lucrezia Forni, Teresa Muratori, and Maria Oriana Galli. These women extended Sirani's influence through the distribution of their own work--from the city of Bologna and its environs to Rome, to the imperial court of Vienna, and perhaps even to England. 

Like her older contemporary, the painter Artemesia Gentilleschi (1593-1656), Sirani painted notable versions of the slaying of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the widow Judith, the climax of the Book of Judith. Since we'll be seeing Gentilleschi's depictions of Judith later this year, I've included Sirani's variations here.

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1658
Burghley House Gallery

Judith with the Head of Holofernes,
The Walters Art Museum

I have relied here on the account of Sirani in Germaine Greer's wonderful 1979 The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, which even today, twenty-five years after its initial publication, remains a compelling--and perhaps the best--analysis of the obstacles faced by women artists. 

Sirani's work was represented in the groundbreaking 1976-77 Women Artists, 1550-1950 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (For the history of this exhibit and its locations, click here.)

For an excellent introduction to Sirani, her work, and a detailed discussion of her Judith paintings, see Jessica Cole Rubinski's recent M.A. thesis, "Elisabetta Sirani's Judith with the Head of Holofernes," available in its entirety here.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., has an example of Sirani's work in its collection:

A detail from Sirani's 1663 Virgin and Child
National Museum of Women in the Arts