h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Judith Leyster was born in 1609 in Haarlem (close to Amsterdam ;The Netherlands).

Her father, Jan Willemsz., was the owner of a brewery called the "Ley-ster" (lodestar), from which the family took its surname.

Little is known of Leyster's early training, but she made a name for herself at a very young age: she is mentioned as an active artist in a famous description of the town of Haarlem, which was published in 1628 when she would have been still only nineteen years old.
Judith Leyster studied in the studio of the Dutch master painter Frans Hals and she remained one of his closest and most successful followers.


Finally Judith Leyster achieved a degree of professional success that was quite remarkable for a female artist of her time. By 1633 she was a member of the Guild of painters, the first woman admitted for which an oeuvre can be cited, and in 1635 she is recorded as having three students. But even in thát high status, she was nót allowed to paint the number 1 genre in these days, because she was a woman....

In 1636 she married Jan Miense Molenaer,a fellow artist and at times close follower of Frans Hals, and the couple subsequently moved to Amsterdam, where they lived until 1648. She painted very little since her marriage, but surely assisted her husband in the real painting, and she also did all the finances, education several children, etc. etc.

She was wonderfully self willed and did things women almost néver did. One example.The signature of a woman did not mean anything, but when she got married she did the whole finance administration and if one did not like it; "sorry, you've got to live with it".

One time a famous notary rang at her doorbell and he wanted to speak her husband for reasons of finance. She said; "I'm running the finance" and appearently the notary did not accept that. "Then you better go home, because I will nót let you in" and sho he hard to turn homewards. Inspiring !

Judith Leyster died in 1660. So she was a remarkable person and artist, especialy for those days. There were just a handful of female masterpainters in Europe in the 17th century.Around 2000 there was a poststamp with her selfportrait. That portrait hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. http://www.nga.gov/

Finally here some links;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Leyster

http://images.google.nl/images?q=ju...r&hl=nl&lr=&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title

and finally

http://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/index_en.html

The other link in the first posting is a wrong one.
Sorry!

Here you see a lot of her paintings, all at once.

http://images.google.nl/images?q=judith+leyster&hl=nl&lr=&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title

Whell, I just saw a painting by her that I 'd not seen so far;
it's part of the link above.

It touches my heart, because she's been able for me to get in touch with common men and women ages ago, with the same emotions, etc. as we all have.

Thanks for her fighting spirit, she could leave a "message".

http://www.wsu.edu/~fa308310/fa308/ner49.jpg

And this is a link to another non-fiction story of mine at H2G2, where she plays an important part;it's about a "virus" and lots of turmoil around Amsterdam in 1635. Real facts.

F134334?thread=3875307

The other day I wrote an e-mail to the owner of
http://tulip-fever.com/home/ which I once had contacted before.



Dear Sir,

This is a refreshing site; open, clear, calm, quality content.
I am born in Harlem and left when I was 18.
Around 2000 I hired a professional in genealogy and both we did research all my ancestors, who apparently lived mainly in Haarlem.

I just want to share some relevant information.
Adding, correcting, suggesting; mainly "sharing", but you may already know most of it, but a few details are commonly unknown when I think b.e. at the Judith Leyster Tulip Book and her own paintings.

1) About the so called "Rembrandt tulips".
Quote from my own story;
"To finish here the history of the tulip fury around 1635.
No one knew that in 1635 the tulips were infected by a virus. The "mosaic virus", that normally lives at fruit trees and apparently made a "journey" into the tulips that were growing around these trees. Tulips have always one of the two basic colours at the skin of the flower. Normally that is not visible. I have forgotten which 2 colours. Because of that virus, this normally hidden colour gets its way out and that created tulips with "flames"!
This virus has been finally detected in 1965 ! Three ages later on!

If one wants to get “some of that history” in his/her own garden, there are two ways.

a) Try to get the real bulbs that are directly linked to their historic variety from around 1635.
These are for sale (some of these and in small quantities)

http://www.hortus-bulborum.nl/eng/home-english.html


And also within the inner circle of hybridizers in Holland.
But, these bulbs are without a virus, so seem rather "dull". It's forbidden to sell these with the virus.


b) Dutch hybridizers have bred nice "look-a-like" flowers that duplicate the flushed look of the tulips during the mania around 1635.
The distinguishing feature: a light colored tulip with deep red, purple or ox-blood broken stripes, flushes or "flames."

Among many 20th century cultivars are look-a-likes as;

Red and white 'Union Jack',
Orange flushed with purple ‘Princes Irene’,
White and purple flecked 'Shirley',
Deep rose and white 'Sorbet',
And primrose yellow and raspberry ’Mona Lisa’
And more of such "a-likes" are available.


For tourists, all these varieties of look-a-likes together are called “Rembrandt tulips”, although there is not one real cultivar with that official name and Rembrandt himself did not paint many flowers/tulips at all.
It’s a useful tourist brand name - not dishonest - that gives tourists a helping hand when they have fallen in love by the beauty of still-life-tulip paintings from the old days, when even Dutch people were spelled by beauty, greed and passion.



2) Speaking of still-life-tulip paintings a few remarks;

a) You’ll know already the story about "Judith Leyster". To make a long story short, see;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Leyster

Why is her name connected to the tulip mania? Judith Leyster was born and raised in Haarlem (where she became master painter and married a master painter Jan Molenaer in Haarlem).

The so called “Tulip books” that were created in those days, were the only way to show potential buyers what they could expect, besides the three weeks that a tulip flower flourishes.

In 2007 there are still 20 tulip-books around the world. You want to buy one? 20.000.000 dollars each.

In the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem there is one such book and it’s called “Judith Leyster tulip book”.
See;
http://www.franshalsmuseum.collectionconnection.nl/WDL/wdl.aspx?lang=english&versie=adult
And click at; “Flower, flower mania”.
In that menu you will also find info about the “Judith Leyster Tulip Book”.
BUT the name is not what one would expect, because only two paintings in that Judith Leyster tulip book have her name on it.
Furthermore, around 2000 it was discovered at the FHMuseum/Haarlem
that only the painting at page 29 is really painted by her. (As you can see when you take a close look at the picture on line of the FHMuseum)
In the museum itself the book is open, behind glass, but at “page 29”.

At the website of the university of Wageningen (centre of the netherlands) there is a large info about tulips and their history.
But my main reason is this;

http://library.wur.nl/tulip/

At this page, you see the menu at the right side “Image books” with three links
http://library.wur.nl/desktop/tulp/cos/origineel/images/index.html

and http://www.nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_culture.asp?culture=Dutch&resultnum=9

And the one in the middle isn’t that important and only in Dutch.

The first of the three links also has the menu, where one can choose to download the whole book at once. The normal menu is page after page.
Anyhow, it’s so beautiful to see and also so sensitive to feel/see how people lived. Just like us, with our greed, passion and fascination for nature. It is nót the Judith Leyster tulip book.

2 b) I already mentioned “still life flower painters”.
I am just a social worker and not very skilled what art-history is concerned, but the first thing one discovers is, that Dutch people hardly know the still life (flower) paintings from around 1635.
The “cult” was mainly in Haarlem. It was far more than just “precise” 19th cent. “naturalism”.

Other famous Dutch still-life-flower-painters from these days are;

Adriaen Coorte painted from 1683 - 1707. c
Jan van Huysum lived from 1682 - 1749.
Rachel Ruysch (female) 1644 - 1750.
Daniel Seghers 1590 - 1661.



2 c) I’d like to finish by writing a few lines of other still-life-painters, (handful from Haarlem) in 17th century Holland.
What they created is sometimes a spell binding beauty ; extreme craftmanship what subject matters is concerned (a painter should make visible in a painting what was silk and what was satin. A lecture about that is found around 1850), combined with a great passion for life.
It’s different than naturalism.
Rich people in those days wanted these paintings, not only to show their richness, but also for the moralistic content of the painting. Mainly;
“How fragile mankind is”, or “life is very short”, etc. Also called;”vanitas”paintings.

I do like modern art very much like Karel Appel, Miró, etc.,
but this can capture my heart just as much ,as it does of thousands of tourists, who even know the námes of these painters, which is not common knowledge in The Netherlands
Ambrosius Bosschaert,

Pieter Claesz, (haarlem)
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-a-4646.z
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/claesz/index.html

Clara Peeters

Jan Davidsz de Heem

Willem Claesz Heda (Haarlem) and his son Gerrit Willemz. Heda.

http://rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-a-4830.z

http://rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-a-137.z

Balthasar van der Ast

See –if whished so – for some others

http://rijksmuseum.nl/zoeken/search.jsp?query=vanitas&lang=en&scope=collection

Because of that “handful from Haarlem” still-life painters around 1635.
I thought it is relevant to mention them. There are more names, but I finish here.

Greetings from Amsterdam

The reason for my e-mail (above) is a comment in the Guardian in 2005

Quote Guardian;

"After five years of production delays, script rewrites and financial problems, a film adaptation of the bestselling novel Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach, is finally going ahead.
Last year, Tulip Fever became the highest profile victim of the government's closure of tax loopholes used by film investors. Now London-based production company Ruby Films has confirmed that the film will shoot in eastern Europe instead of the UK, thus making it affordable on a smaller budget. The BBC and the UK Film Council have both contributed cash"

End quote.

This is new (2007)

http://www.museumdezwartetulp.nl/ see English version