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The Art of Clara Peeters
Clara Peeters (active from 1607 to 1621) was one of the few women painters working in early modern Europe, and a pioneer in the field of still life painting. Her elegant pictures show tables with arrangements of different types of food, vessels, animals and other objects.
This book provides the most up to date study of her career and her works. It places the artist in the cultural and artistic context of Antwerp, and calls attention to the way in which she transformed collecting and display practices into art. The paintings of Clara Peeters also reflect the material culture of the time in Europe. The texts in this book explore the meanings that contemporaries associated with foodstuffs such as fish, cheese, artichokes or pies, with exotic shells and Wanli porcelain, and with birds of prey and other animals.
Also considered are the possibilities and limitations that women artists faced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to widespread prejudices. Clara Peeters’s will to be recognised as a woman painter is manifest in the small self-portraits that exist reflected on the shiny metal surfaces of vessels in several of the paintings reproduced in this book.
The curator of the exhibition of her works and the editorial director of this accompanying publication is Alejandro Vergara, senior curator of Flemish and Northern European Paintings at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.
This book provides the most up to date study of her career and her works. It places the artist in the cultural and artistic context of Antwerp, and calls attention to the way in which she transformed collecting and display practices into art. The paintings of Clara Peeters also reflect the material culture of the time in Europe. The texts in this book explore the meanings that contemporaries associated with foodstuffs such as fish, cheese, artichokes or pies, with exotic shells and Wanli porcelain, and with birds of prey and other animals.
Also considered are the possibilities and limitations that women artists faced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to widespread prejudices. Clara Peeters’s will to be recognised as a woman painter is manifest in the small self-portraits that exist reflected on the shiny metal surfaces of vessels in several of the paintings reproduced in this book.
The curator of the exhibition of her works and the editorial director of this accompanying publication is Alejandro Vergara, senior curator of Flemish and Northern European Paintings at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.
136 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2016
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October 31, 2024
Catalogue published for the exhibition held in Museum Rockoxhuis in Antwerp in 2016, which later moved to the Prado in Madrid (from October 2016 tot February 2017).
The exhibition held 15 paintings by Clara Peeters, of whom about 40 works are known. Peeters is an exceptional talent, working in the early 17th century. She masterfully evokes still-life paintings with a very high degree of realism.
I was godsmacked when I recently saw a still-life of hers in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and sought out a publication on her. This was the only one available. In 1992 Pamela Hibbs Decoteau published another monograph, which appears to be the standard work on Peeters, but it's OOP.
Alejandro Vergara en Anne Lenders texts are well-documented, insightfull and interesting. There is a fair amount of repetition, due to the fact that they approach every text accompanying the 15 paintings as one that can be read as a stand-alone.
The print quality of the illustrations is generally very good.
I do think the book would have benefited tremendously from an inclusion of a list of all know Peeters' paintings, including their whereabouts and a small illustration too. That would have added only a small number of pages, and I'm guessing for an institute like the Prado getting the rights on the images shouldn't be that hard. The fact that the Decoteau is OOP such an inclusion would have been a nice service to any fan of Peeters, and, most importantly, it would have further contextualized the 15 paintings of the exhibition.
Luckily, there's a list online on the site of the RKD.
Click here for a list of all my art book reviews.
The exhibition held 15 paintings by Clara Peeters, of whom about 40 works are known. Peeters is an exceptional talent, working in the early 17th century. She masterfully evokes still-life paintings with a very high degree of realism.
I was godsmacked when I recently saw a still-life of hers in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and sought out a publication on her. This was the only one available. In 1992 Pamela Hibbs Decoteau published another monograph, which appears to be the standard work on Peeters, but it's OOP.
Alejandro Vergara en Anne Lenders texts are well-documented, insightfull and interesting. There is a fair amount of repetition, due to the fact that they approach every text accompanying the 15 paintings as one that can be read as a stand-alone.
The print quality of the illustrations is generally very good.
I do think the book would have benefited tremendously from an inclusion of a list of all know Peeters' paintings, including their whereabouts and a small illustration too. That would have added only a small number of pages, and I'm guessing for an institute like the Prado getting the rights on the images shouldn't be that hard. The fact that the Decoteau is OOP such an inclusion would have been a nice service to any fan of Peeters, and, most importantly, it would have further contextualized the 15 paintings of the exhibition.
Luckily, there's a list online on the site of the RKD.
Click here for a list of all my art book reviews.
Displaying 1 of 1 review