Self-portrait by Judith Leyster

Judith Leyster painted her Self-Portrait around 1630, one of the most celebrated self-portraits by a woman artist in the history of Dutch painting. She shows herself at the easel in the act of painting — a canvas with a laughing violinist visible in the lower left — turned to address the viewer directly in a pose that combines professional assertion with social ease. The painting simultaneously demonstrates her technical mastery — the still-life rendering of the artist's palette and equipment, the fluent figure drawing — and makes a claim for her professional identity as an independent master painter. At the time of painting she was approximately twenty-three years old and had recently attained guild membership, and the portrait asserts this professional status with confident clarity.

The turned pose with the confident smile and the brush poised at the easel projects artistic authority, while the painting-within-a-painting of a laughing musician demonstrates her mastery of the genre that made her reputation.