What Happened to Judith Leyster?

Judith Leyster, Jolly Topper, 1629, Frans Hals Museum

Slightly to the right and just above the beer jug, two letters and a star are visible: "JL". The mark has been there for nearly four hundred years, and during all that time the painting hung on museum walls, was documented in art history catalogues, and passed through the hands of private collectors, meaning it was displayed in plain sight for anyone who looked at it, yet for centuries its meaning remained unknown. "JL*" stood for Judith Leyster, Dutch for "leading star," a playful reference to her name and a signature.

Judith Leyster was a skilled painter: at twenty years old, she had already mastered the contrast between shadow and light that made Dutch Golden Age painting style famous, and in this work she painted a typical tavern scene — a happy drunk with empty jug in hand, red cheeks, big smile, the kind of work that helped painters join the guild, find clients, and get students. By age twenty-four, Judith had achieved what very few women in the seventeenth century could accomplish — she became a master painter in Haarlem's Guild of St. Luke, she run her own workshop and trained students. She also defended her professional rights — when another painter, Frans Hals, convinced one of her students to leave for his studio, she took him to court and won. Her career continued successfully, bringing new commissions and more students to her workshop.

But then, in 1636, she married fellow painter Jan Miense Molenaer, and what happened next is difficult to explain, not because it was dramatic or scandalous, but because it remains mysteriously incomplete. Leyster, who had been producing painting after painting with that distinctive loose brushwork and vibrant light, left significantly fewer signed works from the years after her marriage. Between 1629 and 1635, before the marriage, she created around thirty paintings, although art historians still continue to debate whether some works attributed to other artists might actually be Leyster's, but after 1636, only around five paintings are credited to Judith. The reason is not because she died young — she lived another twenty-four years, managing Molenaer's business affairs while possibly helping with his paintings as well. Meanwhile her husband, Molenaer, kept working, and his career continued without any visible interruption. The contrast between their two career paths after marriage is striking, though the reason for such a drastic change for Judith remain unclear.

One thing is certain: what happened to her identity after she passed away in 1660. When her husband died eight years later, the paintings — Judith's paintings — were listed in his estate inventory, though not under "Judith Leyster,”, as she used to sign her work, nor even under "Judith Molenaer," but catalogued instead as painted by "the wife of Molenaer," or simply as "wife." Though she had legally remained Judith Leyster throughout her marriage, the inventory replaced her name with her husband's, creating the administrative record that would mislead future art historians and collectors. This is how Judith Leyster's name vanished from the historical record for two centuries after her death — her paintings hung in private collections, sold at auctions, appeared in catalogues, since the records had been changed, but "the wife of Molenaer" left no clear trail to follow, and the distinctive "JL*" signature that appeared on dozens of paintings was either ignored, misunderstood, or in some cases intentionally painted over and replaced with other artists' initials, most commonly "FH" which stands for Frans Hals.

The systematic misattribution was not accidental: art dealers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had discovered that paintings signed by women sold for significantly less than works signed by men. In 1892, when British art dealer Thomas Lawrie paid £4,500 for what he believed was a Frans Hals painting — a sum worth over £700,000 today — he discovered Judith Leyster's signature hidden beneath a fake Frans Hals mark, and when Lawrie sued and the painting was correctly reattributed to Leyster, its value dropped twenty-five percent immediately. Lawrie's lawsuit centred on the painting's lost value, not on bringing Leyster's work back to light. For art dealers that signature was the problem: her name, even when it remained legally unchanged and was painted clearly on every canvas, marked the work as less valuable.

What happened to Leyster happened to countless women: marriage split their identity in two, and administrative systems made sure the two halves stayed separate. In some countries, when a woman marries, her original surname is erased entirely and replaced with her husband's surname, either by choice or by law. In others, where women are legally required to keep their birth names, the administrative system still marks the connection: marriage appears as an official note in her records, linking her identity to her husband name. When one set of records identifies someone as Judith Leyster while another set calls the same person "the wife of Molenaer," the two identities appear as different people within the same administrative system. Reconnecting them requires knowing that both names belonged to the same woman, and without that knowledge, the woman disappears into the gap between her recorded identities.

The system that turned Judith Leyster into "wife of Molenaer" exists in different forms across countries, but in Lithuania, it became embedded in the language itself. The historical record reveals how this happened: documents from the sixteenth century rarely mention women at all — but when they were recorded, it was usually only as "widow," noted beside their dead husband's name. By the seventeenth century, women gradually started to appear in official records, though typically identified by their father's name rather than their husband's, and the first Lithuanian suffixes like -aitė (for unmarried women) and -ienė (for married women) started appearing in written documents alongside Ruthenian and Polish forms, with variations depending on regional and local language. By the eighteenth century, these suffixes became standard practice: women's surnames now carried one ending before marriage and a different ending after marriage, while men's names remained stable and unmarked. What looks like ancient Lithuanian tradition was actually built piece by piece across three centuries, as administrative systems slowly developed ways to mark and track women's marital status through their names.

By the time Lithuania regained independence in 1990, this system felt permanent, and what had been constructed across three centuries now seemed timeless and inseparable from Lithuanian identity. The suffixes that marked women's marital status were no longer seen as administrative choices made by scribes who spelled surnames differently depending on which language they were writing in, but as something essential that had always existed for women. The administrative practice had become tradition, and this tradition was sealed as sacred.

The system appeared to change in 2003: the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language introduced -ė suffix, described as an "alternative" to the "basic" traditional forms meaning that any woman could now choose a surname that did not reveal her marital status. Nevertheless, the traditional surname forms remained the norm, and the reform was presented as an option, not as a challenge to the system itself. The backlash revealed what this "alternative" meant: women who wanted the neutral suffix were called "only immoral, dishonourably living women,"¹ and they were told to "take the suffix or not marry at all,"² and also instructed to "renounce Lithuanian citizenship"³ if they refused to mark their marital status. The neutral ending, opponents claimed, would only "hide the fact of being married, and some people might wonder why"³. The objection revealed its own logic: why would a woman hide her marital status unless she had something to hide? The assumption was that marriage was meant to be visible, that a woman's availability  — or lack of it — was public information, readable by anyone who looked at her name. Besides, it was argued that such a surname, with the neutral suffix, wasn't neutral at all — it just marked married women differently. Two decades later, when a modest expansion was proposed — allowing the -a suffix for certain surnames — the fury remained: any change would "destroy the surname system, which has already been systematically organised after all the occupiers"⁴. Ironically none of the occupiers ever touched women surname forms. However the word 'occupiers' did its work: it weaponised national trauma, turned women's demand for privacy into betrayal, and made control look like patriotism. Suddenly, the system that marked women's marital status wasn't surveillance — it was Lithuanian identity itself, something that had survived historical suffering and foreign domination and must not fall to women who wanted unmarked names. The tradition that defenders fought for so fiercely wasn't ancient, wasn't sacred, wasn't even particularly Lithuanian — it was three centuries of administrative practice, built by scribes writing in Ruthenian and Polish, turned into law, and now defended as fundamental to Lithuanian identity.

Lithuania was not the first country to face this question — Poland had solved it nearly a century earlier. It once had a similar system where women's surnames changed based on marital status, marked with suffixes that revealed whether a woman was married or single. By the time World War II ended, the marked suffixes had largely disappeared, replaced by forms that no longer announced a woman's marital status. Meanwhile, Czechia and Slovakia followed a different path: both use feminine surname forms, but these forms do not distinguish between married and unmarried women — a woman could be married, single, or divorced, and no one reading her name would know. Latvia, a century earlier, had reformed its naming system, standardising surname endings that differ by gender but not by marital status. In 2003, when Lithuania introduced the -ė suffix option, it had become the only country in Europe where official surnames still marked whether a woman was married or not. What felt essentially Lithuanian had become uniquely Lithuanian — Lithuania stands alone in Europe with this practice.

The system that felt so fundamentally Lithuanian, defended with such fury, constructed across three centuries and crystallised into law, reveals its purpose when women tried to withdraw from this practice: the fury was never about grammar but about what happens when women refuse to announce their relationship to men in every introduction, every document, every public interaction. The tradition being defended was not linguistic heritage or national identity but a public tracking system, a way to ensure that a woman's availability, her connection to a man remained permanently visible and readable — control masked as preservation, and surveillance called tradition. When Judith Leyster's signature disappeared after marriage, when she was recorded in the inventory only as "wife of Molenaer," when her paintings were attributed to men for two centuries, it was the same mechanism at work. These are not separate stories about art history and linguistics but the same story of how women are kept marked, tracked, and defined by their relationships to men rather than by their own identities — the signature painted over, the surname that broadcasts marital status, the inventory that records "wife of," the administrative practice that becomes sacred tradition, all of it serving the same function to ensure that women never have an identity separate from men. In the end, the fury tells the truth — these systems were never about preservation, only about power.

Notes

¹ Ar moteris turi teisę trumpinti pavardę? (link: https://ve.lt/naujienos/nuomones/nuomones/ar-moteris-turi-teise-trumpinti-pavarde-44048)

² Kalbininko siūlymas moterims: imti pavardę su priesaga arba netekėti (link: https://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/kalbininko-siulymas-moterims-imti-pavarde-su-priesaga-arba-neteketi-21990522)

³ Walkowiak J.B., 2023, Lithuanian Feminine Surname Debates from a Central European Perspective, in Genealogy, Poznan, Poland

⁴ Dar kartą apie moterų pavardžių burbulą (link: https://www.15min.lt/naujiena/aktualu/nuomones/dalia-kiseliunaite-dar-karta-apie-moteru-pavardziu-burbula-18-2064732)

References

Macijauskienė V., 1991, Lietuvių pavardžių susidarymas, Vilnius, Lithuania

Walkowiak J.B., 2023, Lithuanian Feminine Surname Debates from a Central European Perspective, in Genealogy, Poznan, Poland

Paulauskiene A., 2013, Review of Miliūnaitė R.: Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes?, Vilnius Lithuania

Kaip ir kodėl atsirado lietuviškos pavardės (link: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/tavo-lrt/15/124456/kaip-ir-kodel-atsirado-lietuviskos-pavardes)

Lietuviškos ir nelietuviškos pavardės (link: https://vardai.vlkk.lt/lietuviskos-ir-nelietuviskos-pavardes/)

Nutarimas dėl moterų pavardžių rašymo (link: https://www.vlkk.lt/vlkk-nutarimai/suvestines-nutarimu-redakcijos/del-moteru-pavardziu-darymo)

Kam moterims vyriškos pavardės (https://ve.lt/naujienos/lietuva/lietuvos-naujienos/kam-moterims-vyriskos-pavardes)

Tyrėja apie moterų pavardžių pasirinkimą: sulaukia pašaipų, vadinamos blogomis žmonomis (link: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/lietuvoje/2/2258095/tyreja-apie-moteru-pavardziu-pasirinkima-sulaukia-pasaipu-vadinamos-blogomis-zmonomis)

Ar moteris turi teisę trumpinti pavardę? (link: https://ve.lt/naujienos/nuomones/nuomones/ar-moteris-turi-teise-trumpinti-pavarde-44048)

Parlamente – pirmas žingsnis dėl siūlymo leisti moterų pavardes rašyti su galūne -a (link: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/lietuvoje/2/2027756/parlamente-pirmas-zingsnis-del-siulymo-leisti-moteru-pavardes-rasyti-su-galune-a)