Who Was Judith Leyster, and Why Was She So Important?

For more than a century, the Judith Leyster painting now at the Louvre was thought to be by Frans Hals. The misattribution wasn’t completely misguided—The Carousing Couple (1630) shows a loosely painted violinist reveling with a woman who tips her glass and smiles in his direction, precisely the jolly types that the Dutch Golden Age artist was wont to paint. But it was also exactly the kind of image produced by Hals’s peer, an artist who flourished in her lifetime and was then