A renowned work by Flemish Baroque artist Clara Peeters has been discovered in the storage area of the National Museum of Norway in Oslo. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
In 2022, curator Cynthia Osiecki came across an unattributed still life in the museum's storage. At the time, she was studying the work of Clara Peeters, a renowned 17th-century Flemish artist and one of the earliest practitioners of still life painting. Works by Peeters hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The painting, "Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza," was created around 1620 and features nine freshly dead birds, hazelnuts, apricots, and a fly perched on a bunch of grapes. It had once been regarded as the work of Ambrosius Brueghel, a member of a famous family of Antwerp artists. But in the early 20th century, the attribution was reassessed, and the work was reclassified as being by "anonymous." Since then, it had mostly been consigned to storage.
Osiecki began to wonder whether the work could be by Peeters. She examined the panel and discovered it was from a supplier Peeters often used. She also noticed similarities in the tazza and the positioning of the birds and grapes. One problem was that Peeters was well known for signing her works, and the Oslo piece had no signature. But the panel had been damaged by woodworm, and the area eaten away was the bottom edge of the work – the very area where Peeters usually signed her pieces.
Peeters is famous for including miniature self-portraits in her work. Osiecki saw shapes on some of the grapes that looked like outlines of human figures, possibly the artist herself. Earlier this year, the painting was officially reattributed to Peeters. It will be one of the star exhibits in "Woman Painter" at the National Museum of Norway, opening 8 October. The show features works by female artists working across northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650, with paintings by 19 artists including Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, and Clara Peeters.
Peeters was known for intimate still lifes reflecting the transience of this world, says Osiecki. "Her paintings, including the newly attributed work, are all about the brevity of life. We see recently dead birds, who will be part of a feast for humans, and grapes that will soon either be eaten or will decay. And though the work includes luxurious objects such as the tazza, Peeters is making the point that you can't take anything with you when you die. In the end we're all equal."
The reattributed work demonstrates how art history is expanding to include women whose work has been lost or ignored, says Nora Ceciliedatter Nerdrum, director of exhibitions and collections at the National Museum of Norway. Over recent years, Europe's major museums have been opening up to shows of women's work – in 2016, Peeters became the first woman ever to be given a solo show at the Prado.
Nerdrum agrees that the quest to correct the omission of women from the canon of art history began by retrieving known works by women from storage; now, the search is on for women whose work has been labelled "anonymous." "Watch this space, because there will be lots more of these finds in the future," says Osiecki. "The more we look, the more archival research we do, the more women we're going to find."