Overlooked Clara Peeters still life reattributed after decades in Oslo storage

Curator Cynthia Osiecki encountered the unsigned panel painting, Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, in the National Museum of Norway's storage in 2022 while researching Clara Peeters, a 17th-century Flemish artist known for advancing still-life painting in Northern Europe.

The work, created around 1620, depicts nine dead birds, hazelnuts, apricots, grapes with a fly, and a gilded tazza. It had once been ascribed to Ambrosius Brueghel before being reclassified as anonymous in the early 20th century and largely kept out of public view.

Osiecki linked the painting to Peeters by identifying its oak panel as coming from a supplier Peeters frequently used and noting compositional parallels, including a nearly identical tazza and similar arrangements of birds, grapes, and hazelnuts in confirmed Peeters works.

Peeters typically signed her paintings along the bottom edge, but woodworm damage had destroyed that section of the panel, explaining the missing signature.

Peeters also often embedded miniature self-portraits as reflections in shiny surfaces; Osiecki detected faint human-figure outlines on grapes that may represent such a self-portrait, possibly obscured by past conservation treatments.

The museum officially reattributed the painting to Peeters earlier this year. It will be a centerpiece of the exhibition Woman Painter, opening 8 October and curated by Osiecki, which presents 19 female artists active in Northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650, among them Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Judith Leyster.

Osiecki says Peeters' still lifes, including the newly attributed work, emphasize life's transience: recently killed birds destined for a feast, grapes that will be eaten or rot, and luxurious objects that cannot accompany death.

Museum exhibitions director Nora Ceciliedatter Nerdrum notes that the reattribution reflects a broader effort to recover women artists previously lost to anonymous or misattributed holdings, and predicts more such discoveries as archival research deepens.