A wicker basket with apples and pears, a silver tazza with green and red grapes, a squirrel, langoustines, fruit and acorns on a stone ledge

Clara Peeters belonged to the first generation of European artists specialising in still-life painting and was one of its most original practitioners in the seventeenth-century Lowlands. Her earliest dated work appeared within six years of the first known food and flower still-life paintings in northern Europe, and she was also in all likelihood the first European artist to paint a fish still-life (1611; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), which would become something of her specialty. As one of the first great female artists, she declared her mastery of her image and her medium by discreetly including a self-portrait in a number of works, reflected in the objects displayed.

Despite her central position in the development of the still-life genre in the Lowlands, biographical details remain scarce, with fewer than forty signed works by her known today, which she would either inscribe ‘CLARA P’ or, less commonly but as in the present picture, with her full name, ‘CLARA PEETERS’. Neither her place nor date of birth is documented, though all available evidence suggests she worked chiefly in or around Antwerp. A 1635 inventory of an anonymous Amsterdam collection describes ‘a sugar banquet painted in 1608 by a woman Claer Pieters from Antwerp’; at least six of her copper and panel supports bear maker’s marks from the city; and at least three paintings include the same ornate silver knife inscribed with her name and the silver mark of Antwerp (see A. Vergara, ‘Reflections of Art and Culture in the Paintings of Clara Peeters’, The Art of Clara Peeters, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp and Madrid, 2016, p. 13).

Equally unknown is when (and whether) she joined the city’s painters guild. Women were not specifically forbidden from joining Antwerp’s guild, though in practice comparatively few did. Catharina van Hemessen (1527/28-1560), daughter of the renowned Antwerp painter Jan van Hemessen, is the earliest known female artist active in Antwerp. A second local painter’s daughter was registered in the guild in 1575, with a third in 1602 and two more in 1605 (see A. Vergara, op. cit., pp. 21, 45, note 5). That Peeters’ name does not appear among the extant records should not be taken as an indication that she was not a member of the guild. As Pamela Hibbs Decoteau pointed out when addressing this issue, the guild lists in Antwerp are missing for the critical years between 1607 and 1628, a period that encompasses the entirety of Peeters’ known activity (op. cit., p. 9).

Absent any definitive documentary information about Peeters’ life, the works themselves provide the clearest evidence for reconstructing her painterly activities. Just as the marks on the reverse of several panels provide strong indications about where she worked, eleven of her paintings are dated and allow for something of a chronology to be developed. Two early, somewhat awkwardly drawn works bear dates of 1607 and 1608 (both Private collection). Four further pictures (three in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid and one in a Private collection), including Peeters’ earliest dated painting to include flowers, are dated 1611. A similar number of pictures bear the date 1612, while a Garland of flowers with the Virgin and Child is dated 1621 (see P.H. Decoteau, op. cit., p. 33, fig. 19). The general tendencies that emerge in these dated works are an ever-increasing command over the drawing of the depicted objects and an ever-lower vantage point from which they are viewed.

The present picture, which was unknown to Pamela Hibbs Decoteau at the time of her catalogue raisonné, was dated by Dr. Fred G. Meijer to circa 1612 or shortly thereafter in the 2010 sale. The artist’s isolation of the individual objects in the right half of the picture, and the way in which the pewter platter overhangs the edge of the ledge, as if projecting into the viewer’s space, are characteristic of this highly productive period in Peeters’ career. She frequently employed the same objects in a number of compositions, often in new and novel ways. In a picture datable to circa 1611 in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, she included a tazza of identical design but gilt and viewed from a slightly more elevated vantage point (fig. 1). Similarly, the squirrel appears in identical pose in two further pictures datable to approximately the same period – one in the Pitti Palace, Florence (fig. 2), and another sold Christie’s, New York, 22 April 2021, lot 15 (fig. 3), perhaps indicating the animal was first worked out in a preparatory drawing.

Peeters’ compositions were deeply influenced by those of her Antwerp contemporary Frans Snyders, the most successful animal painter in Antwerp in the first half of the seventeenth century. Squirrels first appear in Snyders’ work around 1610-12 (see, for example, H. Robels, Frans Snyders: Stilleben- und Tiermaler, 1579-1657, Munich, 1989, pp. 246-247, no. 98, illustrated), only shortly before Peeters executed the present picture. As is typical of their disparate approach to the depiction of live animals, Snyders’ squirrels stealthily swipe nuts or fruit from a bowl or basket, while Peeters’ have a staid, almost statuesque appearance.

Archival documents and sales indicate the degree to which Peeters enjoyed international critical acclaim in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In addition to the aforementioned Amsterdam inventory of 1635 in which her work was referenced, her paintings were to be found in collections in Rotterdam (1627) and Madrid (1637) in the first half of the seventeenth century. Two pictures by Peeters similarly entered the royal collection in Madrid in or before 1666, while two more were acquired for the collection by 1746 (all Museo del Prado, Madrid; see A. Vergara, op. cit., nos. 1, 2, 7 and 8). A ‘Vogel stuckie’ (Group of birds) likewise features in the 1685 inventory of Rudolphus Mensingh and his wife Agatha Coties in Haarlem, while ‘A Curious piece of Fruit, by Clara’ had made its way to London by 1702, when it appeared at a sale of the collection of the late Mr. John Smith at Exeter Exchange in the Strand on 10 November of that year.

In the course of the twentieth century, Peeters’ reputation was resuscitated through scholarly publications, notably Pamela Hibbs Decoteau’s pioneering catalogue raisonné, and key museum acquisitions. Peeters’ pictures entered the collections of, among others, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (1903); The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1939); Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (1943); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (1986) and, shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2003), through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Edward W. Carter.

In recent years, Peeters’ position as one of the leading still-life painters in the seventeenth century has fully come into focus following the heightened awareness of the significant contributions made by women artists in the early modern era. In 2016, the first monographic exhibition devoted to Peeters’ work was jointly staged by the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, and the Museo del Prado, Madrid, while in the course of the last decade, seminal examples of her work have entered the collections of the Mauritshuis, The Hague (2012); National Gallery of Art, Washington (2018) and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020).