Clara Peeters
(1589 - 1657) |
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still lifes, particularly of breakfast scenes and florals Art Work
| Name: |
Clara Peeters |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Antwerp, Holland |
| Nationality: |
Flemish |
| Birth: |
1589 |
| Death: |
1657 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
still lifes, particularly of breakfast scenes and florals |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
For the wealthy burghers of the Netherlands it was a novelty when artists began painting precious vessels, glittering gold, exquisite flowers and rare shells so naturalistically that one felt one could touch them. The artist arranged the sought-after collector's items on a table, the front edge of which she inscribed in the painting CLARA P. ANNO 1612' (Clara P. in the year 1612). Clara Peeters belonged among the pioneers of still-life painting, In the Netherlands still life, so called because it depicts inanimate objects, became one of the most popular artistic genres in the course of the seventeenth century.
Half the then-known world is represented in the painting. The gold coins had been minted recently in Spain. Lidded goblets of this kind were made in Germany around 1600, and the shiny white dish is a piece of precious Chinese porcelain, introduced to Europe only eight years previously. The exotic shells, too, would have found a treasured place in contemporary chambers of curiosities. The artist certainly did not own the objects, however often valuable items of this kind appear in her paintings. No doubt they belonged to the wealthy individual who commissioned the picture. In combining expensive arts and crafts items with a plain bunch of flowers, Peeters may have been giving her painting an allegorical dimension. Such vanilas still lifes, which were common in the seventeenth century, drew attention to the transience of life and everything else in this world {vanitas means vanity' in Latin), including flowers, riches and art. The artist included herself among the symbolic paraphernalia: her face appears several times as a fleeting reflection of reality in the shiny gold surface of the goblet on the right. The hidden self-portraits also function as a kind of artistic self-advertisement. No other painter employed this virtuoso device as frequently as Peeters; indeed, it was through her that it became a widespread feature of still-life painting.
Such self-portraits constitute the only record of Peeters, a painter whose personal circumstances remain a mystery. It is known for certain neither where she lived nor when she died. Her training and her circle of patrons are the subject of speculation. Her name appears in no list of members of a painters' guild in the Netherlands - although the lists in Antwerp, where she probably worked, have not survived in their entirety for the period concerned. Not even her date of birth can be established beyond doubt. If she is identical with the Clara Peeters who was baptized on 15 May 1594 in the Antwerp church of St Walburga, then she was barely fourteen years old when she created her first, masterly still lifes, judging by the signed and dated pictures by her that have survived, her career as a successful painter lasted at least twenty years. One thing is clear: she must have been a very strong artistic personality to have exerted such a decisive influence on still-life painting, a genre then in its infancy. Peeters's early fish and hunting pieces, for instance, belong among the first pictures of this kind. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still life was to become a specialty of women artists, both professional and amateur, but in the early days of the genre in the Netherlands Peeters was its only female practitioner of note.
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Clara Peeters(1589-1657): Clara Peeters was born possibly in Antwerp, Holland. By the time she was seventeen, her works indicate that she was already a highly accomplished artist. Clara Peeters specialized in still life studies of gorgeous objects, luscious fruits, exotic flowers and expensive food. She was also a portraitis whose works included self-portraits, often reflected in miniature in the objects of her still life studies. |
Samples of Work
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