A stack of cheese on a pewter platter, with butter on a plate, a stoneware jug, bread, pretzels, wine in a façon-de-Venise glass and a knife, on a ledge

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein’s protagonist spoke of pictures like the present and how they made Clara Peeters ‘the greatest woman artist of the seventeenth century’: ‘she used more geometry and less detail than her male peers. Notice here the cylindrical silver canister, the disc of the plate, and the triangular cuts in the cheese. Trust me. This is cheese’ (Barko, op. cit., p. 125). 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 distinctive artistic personality by discreetly including self-portraits in the reflective surfaces of objects in a number of her works.

Despite her central position in the development of the still-life genre in the Netherlands, biographical details remain scarce, with fewer than forty signed works by her known today. Neither her place nor date of birth is documented, though all available evidence suggests she worked chiefly in or around Antwerp, with at least six of her copper and panel supports bearing the maker’s marks of the city. Equally unknown is when (and whether) she joined Antwerp’s painters guild, from which women were not specifically forbidden, though in practice comparatively few did. However, that Peeters’s name does not appear among the extant records should not be taken as an indication that she was not a member. As Pamela Hibbs Decoteau noted 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’s known activity (op. cit., p. 9).

Peeters used the motif of the cheese stack and dish of butter in six further works, all of which share clear geometric patterns and are viewed from a low vantage point. These include the painting from the Carter collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Amsterdam, formerly Westermann collection; Amsterdam, Willem Russell collection; The Hague, formerly A. von Welie collection; The Hague, Mauritshuis; and the picture sold in these Rooms, 12 December 2001, lot 6 (£498,750). Knowing the present example only through black and white images, Hibbs Decoteau deemed it a variant of the Russell picture, with compositional differences, and painted by an artist from Peeters’s circle (op. cit.). Dr. Fred G. Meijer, in concurrence with previous scholarship, most recently reconfirmed Peeters’s authorship (private communication, 2024).

In this still-life genre, which Ingvar Bergström classified as ontbijtes, or ‘breakfast still-lifes’, cheese held a special place, gaining its own particular subgenre. Cheese could be used as a reference to the centrality of dairy products in the agricultural and economic health of the Netherlands, standing as a symbol of national pride and prosperity. It was both a display of gastronomic luxury and a symbol of religious ideas, alluding to overabundance, with a well-known Dutch saying warning: ‘one dairy product upon another is the work of the devil’ (‘zuivel op zuivel is ‘t werk van den duivel’). It was equally regarded as Lenten fare among Protestants, described by the Dutch poet Jacob Westerbaen as ‘a metaphor of the powerful flavour of a simple repast’, particularly when coupled with bread and wine as reminders of the Eucharist.

As here, all of Peeters’s cheese stacks have pride of place in their compositions, and, while each possess their own distinguishing features, they follow a consistent formula. At the base is Gouda, on top of which lies a triangular sheep’s cheese, and in the foreground, a ripe, green, Edam-like cheese, with the shavings of butter always on top. In each cheese can be seen a small carved-out sample suggesting the presence of their taster. Cheeses of this kind, made primarily of cow’s milk, were produced mainly in the province of North Holland and can be recalled in the still-lifes of Haarlem painters like Floris van Dijck (c. 1575-1651), Nicolaes Gillis (c. 1592-c1632/55) and Floris van Schooten (1585⁄88-1656). Peeters seems to have been one of the only painters in the Southern Netherlands to have painted cheese so distinguishably ‘made in Holland’ (see A. Vergara, The Art of Clara Peeters, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp and Madrid, 2016, p. 50).

Peeters exchanged the rich colour of her early works for more humble tones, rendering the textures and surfaces of objects with evident relish. Describing the stack of cheese and butter with particular brio, she uses thick impasto in the highlights and extraordinary subtlety in the rendering of the grooves in the surfaces, at once making them tangible and consumable objects. Bright light from the left creates brilliant accents on the glass, jug, butter and pretzels, offset against the earthy brown of the ledge, while the red currants and yellow and white tones of the cheese and bread draw attention to the silver platters and knife, which balances precariously over the edge of the ledge to reinforce the impression of depth. Peeters employed a standard repertoire of objects in her compositions, including the present façon-de-Venise glass, which can be seen in the Westermann and Russell cheese stacks, as well as in the picture sold in these Rooms in 2001, and the stoneware Raeren jug, which also features in the Mauritshuis picture at a different angle (fig. 1) and the Still life with an artichoke (Germany, Private collection; Hibbs Decoteau, op. cit., no. 21).

Absent any definitive documentary information about Peeters’s life, the works themselves provide the clearest evidence for reconstructing her painterly activities. Eleven dated works allow for something of a chronology to be developed, which show general tendencies towards an ever-increasing command over the drawing of objects and an ever-lower vantage point from which they are viewed. While none of Peeters’s ‘cheese stack’ paintings are dated, they have traditionally been placed in the artist’s maturity. Hibbs Decoteau, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin argued for a dating of the group to the late 1620s and early 1630s, when the artist’s style moved away from the highly finished, vibrant compositions of her earlier pictures towards the ‘monochrome banketje’ tradition that evolved in Haarlem with Pieter Claesz. (1597-1624) and Willem Claesz. Heda (1593-1680) in the second quarter of the seventeenth century (op. cit.). Recent scholarship, however, has reassessed this dating, placing works in the group to an earlier period, from circa 1612 to 1621, the year that the last document referred to her as an active artist (see Vergara, op. cit., nos. 14 and 15). Yet given the paucity of details regarding Peeters’s life and activities, any dating remains hypothetical.