Arizona State University

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Clara Peteers: aan Tafel! & El arte de Clara Peeters/The Art of Clara
Peeters/The Art of Clara Peteers: The Art of Clara Peteers
Review by: Sarah Joan Moran
Source: Early Modern Women , Spring 2017, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Spring 2017), pp. 166-172
Published by: Arizona State University

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Early Modern Women

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Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Vol. 11, No. 2 • Spring 2017

Exhibition Reviews

Clara Peteers: aan Tafel! & El arte de Clara Peeters/The Art of Clara
Peeters. Dual exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional del Prado,
the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, and the
Rockoxhuis Museum. Antwerp, June 16–October 2, 2016; the Museo
Nacional del Prado, Madrid, October 25, 2016–February 19, 2017.
Catalog: The Art of Clara Peteers. Antwerp; Madrid: Rockoxhuis and
Koninklijk Museum; Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016. Available in
Dutch, English, and Spanish. 136 pp. €25. ISBN 978-90-7714-800-6.
The first exhibition of the work of still-life painter Clara Peeters showcases the
talents of a successful female artist working in Antwerp in the early seventeenth
century. Curated by Alejandro Vergara, senior curator of Flemish and Northern
European paintings at the Prado, this dual-location exhibition was installed first
in Antwerp at the Rockoxhuis Museum before moving to Madrid, where Peeters’s
works will be on view until February 19, 2017. It is the first time that either
museum has held a show dedicated to a female artist, and it is truly a jewel, small
but beautifully curated, and designed to claim a place for Peeters in art-historical
narratives while at the same time displaying her oeuvre to open up new questions
and stimulate new research.
Clara Peeters herself is, at least at present, a mysterious historical figure. We
do not know when or where she was born, her social background, whether she
married, or when or where she died. In sketching a tentative biography, Vergara
has turned to the paintings themselves for information. At least six of the wooden
panels and copper plates on which she painted bear marks from Antwerp work-
shops, confirming the single archival reference we have for her location, a 1635
document that states she was “from Antwerp.” We can thus place her production
in that city with a reasonable degree of certainty. Peeters’s earliest dated works of
1607 and 1608 demonstrate the awkwardness of a painter still learning her trade,
which has led Vergara to speculate that she was born around 1590; commonalities

166

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Exhibition Reviews 167

Figure 1. Clara Peeters, Still Life with Fish, 1611. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado
(Catalog, 8).

in subject matter and composition with the still lifes of the Antwerp painter Osias
Beert suggest that she may have studied under his tutelage.
By 1611, however, the date inscribed on a still life of fish — the earliest
known painting of this subject in existence (Fig.1) — she had clearly matured
into a skilled, independent artist who wielded her brush with confidence. Over
the next decade and possibly for much longer, Peeters produced refined, highly
detailed still lifes, specializing in a few discrete themes: fish pieces, banquets with
multiple types of foodstuffs, flower pieces, and dead birds, often depicted with
the falcon used to hunt them. Some of her paintings combine a number of these
objects, as well as coins, jewelry, and seashells, which were valued collectibles.
Based on the repetition of certain motifs across paintings and variations in the
production quality within some paintings, Vergara speculates that Peeters ran a
workshop where assistants were charged with executing elements of some paint-
ings. References to her paintings in Amsterdam in 1635 and Madrid in 1637
show an international appreciation for her work, and likely indicate that she
exported her paintings through dealers.

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168 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Exhibition Reviews

Figure 2. Clara Peeters, Still Life with Cheese, Almonds and Pretzels, c.1612–15 (detail).
The Hague, Mauritshuis (Catalog, 14).

Both iterations of the installation have been small and intimate, limited
to two rooms at the Rockoxhuis and one larger room at the Prado. Most of the
paintings displayed in the first installation also appear in the second, and together
they include about half of Peeters’s thirty-four known works. The intimate set-
tings of both shows encourage close engagement with the paintings, with viewers
noticeably taking time to study the details and to make comparisons across the
works. Peeters is arguably at her best when painting the textures of food, from
the oily surfaces of olives to flaky bread crusts, soft puckered dates, crumbly
cheeses, the wet scales of freshly-caught fish, brittle pretzels, and hard crystalline
rock candy; more than one visitor was overheard expressing that they regretted
not having eaten before they came. This process of close looking also brings the
artist herself into focus, as Peeters insistently inscribed her identity on many of
these pieces through conventional signatures, illusionistic signatures “engraved”
on knife handles (Fig. 2), and in tiny self-portraits painted as reflections in glass
and metal objects (Fig. 3), sometimes repeated across multiple curved surfaces in
the same painting.
Viewers at the Rockoxhuis had perhaps something of an advantage, as the
museum provided a pamphlet with fairly detailed descriptions of each work in
the exhibition, whereas the Prado visitors received a much shorter brochure with

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Exhibition Reviews 169

Figure 3. Clara Peeters, Still Life with Flowers, Gilded Cups, Coins and Shells, 1612 (detail).
Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle (Catalog, 11).

general information. The Rockoxhuis exhibition also included more contextual

material. Its first, small room contained still life paintings by Beert, Jeremias van
Winghe, Floris van Schooten, and Jacob Foppens van Es, as well as examples
of luxury objects very like those painted by Peeters: a late sixteenth-century
silver saltcellar, a gilded fruit dish, imported Chinese porcelain bowls, goblets
à la façon de Venise. These provided an artistic and cultural backdrop for the
second room, dedicated to Peeters’s paintings. Those interested in catching
a glimpse of the Rockoxhuis installation, as well as some beautiful details of
Peeters’s paintings, may view the short video, “Bij Clara Peeters aan Tafel,” nar-
rated in Dutch by KMSKA curator Nico van Hout: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=qggoPE4DuqM.

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170 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Exhibition Reviews

The Prado show includes just one contextual object, but it is an especially
rich one: Jan Brueghel the Elder’s allegorical Sense of Taste (1618). The piece,
which resonates with Peeters’s food still lifes, invites viewers to think about how
her contemporaries conceptualized food, eating, and gastronomical pleasure, as
well as how these painted motifs shift in meaning with changes of scale or in
combination with other elements.
The rather minimalist approach to these installations allows the viewers to
concentrate on Peeters’s works and, by extension, on the artist herself. By contrast,
the exhibition’s catalog takes an expansive view of its subject matter, analyzing
Peeters’s paintings from various angles to situate them socio-culturally. All of
the catalog entries are by Vergara, with the two entries on paintings of birds co-
authored with José Manuel Rodriguez-Villa of the International Association for
Falconry and Conservation of Birds of Prey. In addition the catalog contains two
well-researched, in-depth essays by Vergara and Anne Lenders, which situate
Peeters’s still lifes in their historical context.
Vergara’s essay summarizes what we know about Peeters’s life and work,
and then addresses how we might contextualize her artistic production. He
first considers the challenges that early modern women in the Southern Low
Countries faced in becoming artists, looking broadly at the ways they were barred
from public and professional life. He considers the circumstances under which
they might have circumvented those barriers, drawing on well-known examples
of women artists such as Catharina van Hemessen, Lavinia Fontana, Sofonisba
Anguissola, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Vergara also raises the possible connec-
tion between genre and gender, suggesting that Peeters’s pursuit of still life as a
genre might have been influenced by her lack of access (as a woman) to anatomi-
cal models, and notes the artistic-self awareness of her reflected self-portraits,
which place her work within a long Netherlandish tradition going back to Van
Eyck. He then examines Peeters’s work in terms of its place in the development
of still-life painting as an independent genre, at traditions of depicting natural
specimens, and at the role that the rich foods and luxurious tableware she depicts
played in feasting culture and marking social status. Next is a discussion of her
paintings’ relationship to the shifting status of hunting at the Brussels court, fol-
lowed by an assessment of the status of the porcelain dishes Peeters paints as
exotic objects. Finally he returns to a more purely art-historical issue, raising the
question of naturalism and its meanings in the early seventeenth century.

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Exhibition Reviews 171

The second essay, by art historian Anne Lenders, takes a closer look at the
particular objects depicted in Peeters’s paintings, identifying them in terms of
their materials, how and where they were made, and what meanings they would
have borne. The essay includes fascinating discussions of Low Countries dairy
products and their export, as well as various types of bread, pastries, and sweets,
their costs, and the social implications of their consumption. Lenders also dis-
cusses the tableware depicted in Peeters’s paintings: porcelain, stoneware, glass,
and gilded silver saltcellars, cups, and dishes. For each of these objects she has
tracked down actual surviving examples that are very close in design to those in
the paintings. Of particular interest is the knife that appears with Peeters’s illu-
sionistic signature. This type of knife, with its engraved silver handle, was often
given at weddings as part of a set and was known as a bruidsmes or bride’s knife.
The same knife, engraved with the figures of Faith and Temperance, reappears in
several paintings, which suggests that it was a real object and perhaps Peeters’s
own bridal gift. On the other hand it may simply be a painterly device that she
developed, with the allegorical figures standing for a personal motto. Lenders
closes with a brief discussion of how all of these painted objects and comestibles
might have been interpreted in combination with each other, proposing that the
images held multiple valences for the contemporary viewer.
Art history’s relationship to women artists has long been fraught. In 1971,
Linda Nochlin famously asked why there had been no great female artists, and
over the next decades art historians interested in women turned away from the
patriarchal structures of guilds, academies, and the notion of genius and towards
viewership, representation, material culture, and the patronage of elite women
to find female experiences of art. At the same time, evidence was emerging that
some women actually did make successful careers as artists, but even as their
works were uncovered, they were often re-ghettoized by a scholarly fetishiza-
tion of their gender that insisted on reading their works as expressions of their
presumed feminine impulses or emotionality (the literature that reads Artemisia
Gentileschi’s violent paintings as expressions of her personal anger is the most
glaring example). In the last decade or so it seems that we are finally approach-
ing an equilibrium. Increasing numbers of women artists are emerging from the
archives, and we are studying them on their own historical terms. That is precisely
how Alejandro Vergara and the exhibition organizers in Antwerp and Madrid
have framed Clara Peeters: not as a “woman artist” or even as a “great artist,” but
as a professional painter who faced particularly gendered challenges, whose work

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172 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Exhibition Reviews

is of historical importance, and who merits our interest. Early modern women
artists do seem to be entering the spotlight; a new exhibition on Gentileschi will
open soon at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome from November 30, 2016 to May 8,
2017, and one on Michaelina Woutiers is slated for fall, 2018 at the Rubenshuis
in Antwerp. This reviewer’s hopes are high that these events will build on the
precedents set by The Art of Clara Peeters, and that the exhibitions on these three
women artists will both inspire new scholarship and help to reshape public per-
ception of women’s place in the history of art.
Sarah Joan Moran
Independent scholar

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