March is Women’s History Month, and we’ll take the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate some great female artists from the history of Western civilization. Our three highlighted artists include Judith Leyster, Angelica Kauffman, and Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau. After brief introductions, we’ll examine a work of art from each. Judith Leyster (1609–1660) Judith Leyster was a Dutch pain in the 17th century. Her father changed his family’s surname to Leyster, after a brewery he owned. By 1628, when she was 19 years old, Leyster had already been recognized as an active artist in Haarlem by Dutch minister and poet Samuel Ampzing. In 1633, at the age of 24, Leyster was the first documented woman with a body of paintings admitted as a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke. At the time, she also had three students to whom she taught the craft of painting. Most of her paintings …