page_title: Clara Peeters
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Clara Peeters / Work
context_page_description: Clara Peeters was a Flemish still-life painter from Antwerp who worked in both the Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic.
  Peeters is the best-known female Flemish artist of this era and one of the few women artists working professionally in seventeenth-century Europe, despite restrictions on women's access to artistic training and membership in guilds. Peeters specialized in still-life paintings with food and was prominent among the artists who shaped the traditions of the Netherlandish ontbijtjes, "breakfast pieces," scenes of food and simple vessels, and banketjes, "banquet pieces" with expensive cups and vessels in precious metals.
context_section_description: Peeters signed thirty-one works "CLARA PEETERS" or "CLARA P.", and dated many of them, which leaves a strong record of her work from 1607 to 1621. Eighteen of these were completed by the time she was eighteen years old. In addition, another seventy-six works are speculated to be in her oeuvre, although documentation is lacking to assign them affirmatively to Peeters. Several of her paintings, including two illustrated here, carry the signature represented as an engraved inscription on the side of the handle of the same decorated knife. The knife has two nude female figures on the main face of the handle that is visible, and is typical of the sort of "brides knife" (bruidmessen) Antwerp silversmiths produced around 1595–1600. These may represent a real knife owned by Peeters, or simply an imagined one.
  Peeters was among the earliest specialist painters of still lifes and flowers, working while this genre was still emerging. Fewer than ten paintings of flowers and fewer than five of food produced in the Netherlands can be dated before 1608, when she painted her first recorded work. She painted a set of four larger than usual (all 50‒51 × 71‒73 cm) still lifes, three dated 1611, that were in the Spanish royal collection by the following century (now in the Prado). The set includes the earliest still-life of dead game birds, if Jacopo de' Barbari's famous Still-Life with Partridge and Gauntlets (1504, now Munich) from a very different tradition is excepted. The Prado group were split between Spanish palaces in the 18th century, with the earliest inventory record for any being in 1734, when one was rescued in the fire that destroyed the Royal Alcazar of Madrid. Her paintings of fish and game of 1611 appear well before other artists used similar subject matter. 
  In her works before 1620, Peeters was especially fascinated by the fall of light on metal objects – coins, goblets, pewter dishes, etc. – and their reflections. She depicted herself in the reflection of goblets and gilt-cups of many of her paintings, a custom in Netherlandish art dating back over a century, as seen in works like Jan van Eyck's Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele (1434–1436).
caption: Still Life with Nuts, Candy and Flowers, 1611, with the artist reflected several times in the metal pieces
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