Judith Leyster (1609-1660) was a Dutch Golden Age painter and one of the first women painters active during that era, whose work was highly desired in her own lifetime and who was, simultaneously, married to another esteemed painter—Jan Miense Molenaer (1610-1668). She has long thought to have been a pupil of the fellow Haarlem-based Dutch Golden Age painter, Frans Hals (1582/3-1666), although there is no documentary evidence to know this with any degree of certainty.

Her original self-portrait from 1630—today—is part of the collection of Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art.   This pixelated, imaginary self-portrait of the artist, is the first contemporary artwork in a series of similar self-portraits—all portraying celebrated Dutch Old Master painters active within the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. With a total of 27 self-portraits in this collection, and numerous variations of each painter's self-portrait; this genesis artwork serves to introduce the oeuvre of Judith Leyster, and her contemporaries, to a new generation of art connoisseurs and digital art collectors. In doing so, it brings the art of the past, closer to the present.   Welcome, to the Dutch Golden Age.