Judith Leyster
1609–1660
A master painter in a man's guild, sued Frans Hals, and spent two centuries attributed to him anyway.
TBD
She was one of the most revered artists in Amsterdam and ran a workshop with at least three male apprentices - nearly unheard of for a woman to legally employ. When one of them walked out mid-contract to study under a more famous master, Frans Hals, she sued him. And won.
But after she died, her signature was painted over. Her work sold better under a famous man's name, so for two hundred years, it did. Her paintings hung in the Louvre, the Met, the National Gallery - labeled Frans Hals. Then in 1893, a curator noticed something: the signature underneath the signature. In her self-portrait, she looks directly at us, brush in hand, caught mid-smirk - as if she always knew we'd eventually show up, and wasn't the least bit surprised it took this long.
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The Artist
Karin Verlo Rose is a creative director, illustrator, and photojournalist based in Colorado. A graduate of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, her work captures a single life moment that makes people pause and think. Her illustrated pieces follow a recurring female figure through scenes of contradiction - sacred and commodified, exposed and restrained, innocent and consumed. Her photography works the same instinct in real time: portraits caught in the moment before someone knows a camera is on them, intimate and often dwarfed by something larger than themselves - moments that tip from ordinary into strange, tender, or unresolved.
