painting
Still Life with Fish
Clara Peeters
About this work
Object details
- TitleStill Life with Fish
- Date1612-1621
- Mediumoil on panel
- Measurements35 × 48 cm
- Inventory number834
- Inscriptionslower left: CLARA . P
More about this work
Fresh fish on display
Still-life painting became a specialist genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More and more specific types were gradually developed, including still lifes devoted entirely to seafood. Clara Peeters was one of this sub-genre’s pioneers. Fish was a very important source of nutrition in her era too.
Here, a glossy carp and a pike are laid out on a terracotta colander, ready to be cooked. Also on the imaginary menu are boiled crayfish on a pewter plate, which reflects onto the colander, smoked herring, perch (right), several types of oysters and pink shrimp. Note the chip taken out of the rounded edge of the table – tricks like this helped the artist create a sense of depth.
Despite her success, we have identified barely fifty works by Clara Peeters so far, most of which are signed. It is no coincidence that she practised an ‘everyday’ genre such as still life, as women artists rarely had access to training and certainly not when it came to painting nude models. This made it hard for them to work in more grandiose, narrative genres.
Peeters collaborated with assistants and often painted the same objects with the same dimensions, using patterns or tracings to save time and labour. As a result, her works often resemble one another – including this painting – in terms of size and content. All the same, this is not serial production, otherwise a work like this would not have been signed.
References
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