The lute player

Judith Leyster painted The Lute Player around 1620, one of her earliest known works demonstrating her precocious mastery of candlelit nocturnal genre scenes in the tradition of Honthorst and the Utrecht Caravaggists. The young lutenist playing by candlelight was a subject within the tradition of musical genre scenes that combined the pleasures of music-making with the technical challenge of rendering the warm, intimate quality of candlelight. Leyster's early mastery of this demanding subject suggests a training that went beyond the conventional apprenticeship for women painters and placed her firmly within the most technically ambitious traditions of Haarlem painting in the years around 1620.

The musician's smiling face and the carefully rendered lute are painted with confident, visible brushwork, the warm palette and intimate scale creating a more personal mood than Hals's similar subjects.