‏ Treeshe 𐂂

GM! In recent days I have been working on a new series of research entitled “The Missing Masters: Rediscovering Unsung Women Artists”. The series focuses on reclaiming the place of women who shaped art history but were systematically overlooked, undercredited or erased from the traditional canon. It examines the lives, works and historical contexts of these artists, many of whom worked in the shadows of more celebrated male contemporaries, while exploring the structural forces that kept their contributions invisible. By bringing their stories and artistic legacies back into view, the series challenges long-standing narratives of art history and argues for a more complete and inclusive understanding of the past. The artist in this series today is Judith Leyster (1609–1660), one of the few professional women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. In the early 1630s she joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, ran her own workshop and produced lively genre scenes and portraits that rivalled those of contemporaries such as Frans Hals. Leyster's independent career effectively ended after her marriage in 1636 to the fellow painter Jan Miense Molenaer and the birth of their five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. The demands of raising a family and managing a household left little time for her own painting. Only a handful of works, including botanical illustrations for a tulip catalogue, can be securely dated to the years after her marriage. For centuries her earlier paintings were attributed to Hals or to her husband. This fate was shaped both by the practical interruptions of motherhood and by the gender biases that erased many women artists from the historical record.