Clara Peeters

Clara Peeters was a Flemish painter of the early seventeenth century, among the first specialists in still life and one of the best-known women artists of her time. Her dates of birth and death are uncertain: a baptism in Antwerp in 1594 may be hers, and her documented work runs from 1607 to about 1621. She was in Amsterdam by 1611 and in The Hague by 1617, so she worked in both the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. Peeters painted food still lifes, in the traditions of the breakfast piece and the banquet piece, with cheese, fish, bread, game, fruit and gleaming metal and glass vessels. She sometimes painted her own tiny reflection in the polished surfaces. Her first known picture is signed and dated 1607, and she signed some thirty works. A set of four large still lifes, three of them dated 1611, is in the Prado in Madrid, and a seafood still life is in Antwerp's Royal Museum of Fine Arts. Many copies of her pictures exist, suggesting she may have run a workshop.