The Proposition

A man leans over a woman, offering her a handful of gold coins. She keeps sewing by the light of a single oil lamp, not looking at him. In seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting the offer of coins for sex was a stock joke: the woman always eventually turns and smiles. Judith Leyster painted the woman refusing. It is unique. The subject was so unusual that for centuries the painting was reattributed to male painters (Frans Hals, Gerard van Honthorst); only in 1928 was it firmly returned to Leyster. She was the first Dutch woman admitted to the Haarlem painters' guild. Now at Mauritshuis, The Hague @mauritshuis