Clara Peeters painting found in Norway museum storage
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- Cynthia Osiecki identified an unattributed still life in the storage of the National Museum of Norway in 2022 while researching Clara Peeters, one of the earliest still-life practitioners.
- The painting, Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, dates to around 1620 and depicts nine dead birds, hazelnuts, apricots, and a fly on grapes; it was reassigned from Ambrosius Brueghel to "anonymous" in the early 20th century.
- Osiecki matched the Oslo work to Peeters by identifying the same wood-panel supplier she used, a similar gilded tazza dish, and a comparable arrangement of birds, grapes, and hazelnuts.
- The panel's bottom edge—where Peeters customarily signed—was eaten away by woodworm, explaining why the painting had circulated unsigned for centuries.
- The work was officially reattributed to Peeters in early 2025 and will anchor the exhibition Woman Painter at the National Museum of Norway opening 8 October.
- Woman Painter features 19 female artists working across northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Judith Leyster.
- In 2016, Peeters became the first woman ever given a solo show at the Prado in Madrid; her work also hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Why it matters: For Europe's major museums already racing to fill gaps in the art-historical canon, the Peeters reattribution models a new phase: moving beyond recovering known works by women from storage to actively hunting for works filed as "anonymous" that may be by women. With Peeters' paintings hanging in the Prado, the Ashmolean, and the Met, the Norwegian find suggests institutions worldwide may be sitting on similarly misclassified pieces.
