Antwerpen 1588/89-1636 Gent

Clara Peeters is the best-known female Flemish artist of the early seventeenth century and one of the few women artists working professionally in this period in 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. 

 

Details of Peeters’ life are unclear.
Early researchers confused her with other women bearing the same relatively common name, ranging from an Antwerp heiress to an Amsterdam prostitute. In a publication form 2017, Jean Bastiaensen has persuasively identified her with Clara Lamberts, who was born into an artistic family in Mechelen between 1581 and 1585. This Clara moved to Antwerp as a child, where she may have been trained by her father Nicasius Lamberts. On June 27, 1605, she married the painter Henrick II Peeters in Antwerp, whose status as a freeman of the Guild of Saint Luke would have absolved her from enrolling in her own name, explaining her absence from the guild’s records. The artist’s earliest dated painting, a still life of confectionery, wine, and a candle, dates from two years after this marriage and bears what became her standard signature: CLARA P. Although the artist’s latest dated painting is from 1621, indicating a career of some fourteen years, there are further archival records for Clara Peeters, née Lamberts, in Antwerp, The Hague, and Ghent up to the year 1637, which give hints of a relatively unsettled existence. Inventory records from the first half of the seventeenth century indicate that her work quickly attracted notice in the Dutch Republic and Spain, and two of her paintings appear to have entered the Spanish royal collection by 1666. Curiously, there are no identifiable records of her work in early modern Antwerp inventories.

Although she was not in its records, at least one painting of Peeters bears the stamp of the Antwerp Guild on its back, indicating she may indeed have been a member, or at least worked on panels made by members of the Antwerp Guild.
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. 

Peeters often painted the same objects in different paintings, combining them in a variety of ways.  The gilt lidded glass in this painting can also be seen in the still life with cheese in the Mauritshuis The Hague (inv.no. 1203) This is a piece of so called façon de Venise glassware. As early as the first half of the sixteenth century, crystal glass was made in Antwerp after Italian examples. Later, at the end of the century this glass came to be produced in other parts of the Low Countries, such as Middelburg and Amsterdam. Such glassware is therefore called à la façon de Venise, in the venetian manner. These glasses were used for wine.

As P. Hibbs Ducoteau points out, there is a striking similarity between the basket with fruit  this painting and the signed picture in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford. (inv.no. WA1940.2.61)
The Ashmolean picture can be dated to ca. 1612 on the basis of the depicted silver ducate or Brabant coin. The same basket of fruits appears in both works, and the rendering of the highlights on the vines and leaves is very similar in both pictures. However since this painting shows a lower viewpoint, a reduction of objects and a more condensed composition, a date a little later than 1612 can be considered. 

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