In 1893, a close look at a celebrated Frans Hals painting in the Louvre revealed a small monogram beneath the forged signature: an intertwined J and L with a five-pointed star. It belonged to Judith Leyster, a 17th-century Haarlem painter who was famous in her lifetime and then erased from history for more than two centuries. This episode reconstructs her rise in the hyper-competitive Dutch Golden Age art market, from a brewer's daughter to one of the first women admitted to the Guild of St. Luke as a master painter.

We examine her confident alla prima self-portrait in an expensive lace collar, her workshop with three male apprentices, and the 1635 lawsuit she brought against Hals himself over a poached student. We also look at how The Proposition subverted the tavern-scene genre, how dealers scraped away her star and painted in Hals's init ...