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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Joanna Moorhead

Buried for not being Brueghel: overlooked masterpiece by still-life pioneer discovered in storage area

Clara Peeters' still life shows dead birds, fruit, and grapes piled on a gilded tazza
Revivified … Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza by Clara Peeters, c1620, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. Photograph: Børre Høstland/The National Museum

Anonymous was often a woman: so said Virginia Woolf. And so thought Cynthia Osiecki one day in 2022, when she chanced on an unattributed still life in the storage area of the National Museum of Norway in Oslo.

Osiecki had been studying the work of a renowned 17th-century Flemish artist, Clara Peeters, one of the earliest practitioners of still life painting. Works by Peeters hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

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