Clara Peeters

Project Overview

Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, is an exemplary model for analyzing Clara Peeters’ use of repetition throughout her oeuvre. The objects and motifs pictured within this image appear multiple times, often in different contexts, across her other still life works. Take the largest of objects, the stack of cheese topped with a butter dish, as an apt example. This same stack appears five times among her known works, ranging in dates from 1615 to 1630. Another object worth noting is the bridal knife, a traditional object gifted to women on their wedding day, engraved with Clara Peeters’ name along the side. This knife serves as her signature in six works. The most striking repetition, however, comes in her compositional structure for Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels. An undated piece, documented only in black-and-white photographs, has the same compositional structure to the point of confusion between the two works. In the second image, Cheesestack, each object from the prior painting is repeated, with differences appearing only in the edge of the table, which is dented in Still Life with Cheese, and the scattered almonds next to the knife, which differ in their arrangement. Still Life with Cheese, Bread, and Pretzels, also employs an almost identical group of objects, though arranged differently on the table. Instead of the bridal knife, a simple table knife is pictured, and the plate of almonds is replaced by two bread rolls. The flacon-de-venise also differs in shape and appears on the other side of the composition. These observations became apparent in my research through the use of Tropy, a digital humanities image-based software. Though the trajectory of this research is unclear, the data gathered through this project will be invaluable for my future explorations of Clara Peeters’ work.

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