The town of Gouda in Holland acquired a monopoly on the Dutch cheese commerce by 1395, promoting its eponymous dairy product for greater than two centuries earlier than Clara Peeters utilized oil to canvas. Contemporaneous viewers of “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries,” painted someday between 1612 and 1618 and now exhibited on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, would have acknowledged the cheese immediately — each Dutchman value his salt knew the delicate nutty taste and buttery plasticine snap of a Gouda slice. In her composition, Peeters presents a neatly cleaved wheel wrapped in a skinny layer of white-streaked pink wax, seeming to glow in distinction to a darkish background, as if it’s been generated from the void itself. It’s the single largest product within the portray, dominating the composition from its seat on a smudged pewter dish, its mottled floor studded with small glowing salt crystals, its floor striated with slight, irregular gradations from its resistant encounter with a chisel.
The colour of the Gouda is tinged with a delightful orange, its slight tan differentiating it from the greenish-brown of a Kruidenkaas wedge flavored with parsley and a block of crumbly, grayish Trappist cheese, that are positioned in entrance of and on high of it, respectively. Balanced atop the Trappist cheese is a blue-and-white porcelain plate bearing thick ribbons of butter marked by the serrations of the knife used to scrape it from the crock. A spherical, browned roll is positioned earlier than the tableau of cheese, whereas a freshly cut-in-half artichoke, its interior leaves shifting from pink to inexperienced from coronary heart to exterior tendrils in a borderline erotic show, dominates the left. Behind the fleshy artichoke is a pewter pillar, adorned in beautiful floweret designs, a pinch of glowing, diamondiferous salt atop. Scattered in entrance of the meal are a number of lurid pink cherries, some nonetheless related by their stems. “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries” isn’t only a image of life — it’s one thing extra. Peeters has captured, with unnerving verisimilitude, a pure, crystalline second of time.
Earlier than taking a look at a Peeters composition, we want to consider the bigger context of the style of nonetheless life. Dismissed as mere demonstration of approach (which in Peeters’s case was appreciable) or as a type of early fashionable luxurious commercial — all these canvases with fowls and fruits, cheese and nuts — works on this selection are too typically handed over as mere painterly ephemera. Although the style has a historical past courting again to antiquity, and painters from Caravaggio to Cézanne practiced the shape, there stays an inclination to interpret nonetheless lifes as spectacular workouts greater than creative expression. Even when the style is given essential consideration, aesthetic judgment of Dutch examples — works by Willem Claesz, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Kalf, and Peeters, for example — is commonly subsumed into sociological or historic readings. In these interpretations, the beautiful accuracy of nonetheless life is known as a mirrored image of Dutch secularism inspired by the Calvinist Reformation, which changed doubtlessly idolatrous non secular topics with fruit and greens; or a celebration of the Netherlands’s profound wealth, the nascent capitalist republic’s worldly treasures of products on full show within the type of Dutch cheese and Chinese language porcelain, Italian wine and Hanseatic salt. As Sybille Ebert-Schifferer places it in Nonetheless Life: A Historical past (1999), critics have traditionally consigned nonetheless life painters to “the lowest rank among artists,” deciphering their compositions as “symptomatic of a decline in artistic taste.”
Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels” (1615), oil on panel, on view on the Mauritshuis Museum, the Hague, Netherlands (picture public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Maybe it was as a result of style’s low standing that it was one of many few kinds open for ladies to show their abilities — which Peeters did, establishing a popularity as a genius painter in a subject dominated by males. Little is understood of her biography; although she was most definitely an Antwerp native, she seems to not have been a member of the Guild of St. Luke, the confraternity of painters in that metropolis. She could have skilled beneath the comparably good painter of nonetheless lifes Osias Beert, and even Jan Brueghel the Elder, however it’s additionally been hypothesized that Peeters led her personal creative faculty. No matter how or the place they have been made, 31 work are substantiated together with her signature, and greater than 100 are attributed to her. Of those, it’s attainable that greater than a dozen have been rendered earlier than Peeters turned 18 — a veritable baby prodigy. Although she was identified in her time for her “accurate, meticulous portrayals of nature, which include small details such as dew drops and insect bites,” as Julia Binswanger writes in Smithsonian Journal, she was largely forgotten for hundreds of years earlier than being not too long ago resurrected in scholarly circles, with exhibitions of her work held in establishments such because the Prado.
The philosophical significance of Peeters’s work, nonetheless, cuts by way of any interpretive squabbles and even historic restraints as cleanly as a knife cleaves cheese. Even when institutionalized chauvinism made non secular or historic topics forbidden to her, her nonetheless lifes burst forth with the rapturous readability of the current. A nonetheless life, as its identify suggests, stills life — it shows a slice of time divorced from the entire; it calms the vortices and eddies that compose the tumult of existence. Removed from a mere train in domesticity and commercialism, an adept nonetheless life is able to temporal defamiliarization — essentially, it makes actuality unusual. Study “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherry” or any variety of different compositions by Peeters, comparable to “Table with a cloth, salt cellar, gilt tazza, pie, jug, porcelain dish with olives, and roast fowl” (c. 1611) or the unsigned “Still Life with Crab, Shrimps, and Lobster” (c. 1635–40), and it turns into clear that all of them share not simply an incongruity within the association of objects, however a selected relationship to paint, most of all mild and darkness. As Alejandro Vergara-Sharp places it in Clara Peeters (2025), the painter is masterful in combining completely different coloured objects, notably in framing darkish and light-weight in distinction to one another. In every case, the result’s a portray that’s unnerving, if not eerie. All these wheels of cheese and platters of shrimp, bouquets of flowers and bowls of almonds, float in an undifferentiated darkness as in the event that they exist in eternity. The uncanniness of those work arises exactly from the startling accuracy of existence represented.
Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Crab, Shrimps and Lobster” (c. 1635–40), oil on wooden, held on the Museum of Fantastic Arts, Houston (picture by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Even when Peeters makes use of the nonetheless life type to precise a vanitas place, which is widespread within the style, her work are a realm the place that cheese shall by no means mould and people cherries are perpetually free from rot. Entropy is conquered inside her frames, and so her work turn out to be reminders of how unusual the circulate of that very medium is. These borders of blackness — that undifferentiated nothingness current within the overwhelming majority of her works — serve to isolate her components, as if a single second might perpetually be preserved as a pattern, a specimen, an artifact. That’s what’s so haunting about these compositions: They current to us the singular strangeness of the second.
“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment,” writes the French thinker Henri Bergson in his 1903 An Introduction to Metaphysics. Insomuch as existence is definitely skilled, he suggests, all of us are perpetually getting into new rivers and discovering that we are able to’t go house once more. Stillness is the profound phantasm of Peeters’s works: Motion paused in such beautiful element that it looks like being pierced. In her 1615 “Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds, and Pretzels,” whereby her reflection might be espied on the pewter deal with of a jug (on view on the Mauritshuis Museum, the Hague, Netherlands); “Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Bread sticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher” (1611, held on the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain); or “Table with a cloth, salt cellar, gilt tazza, pie, jug, porcelain dish with olives, and roast fowl” (c. 1611, on view at El Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain), the current is remoted from motion, not in a relationship to the previous nor the longer term — and thus the clearest evocation of what it might be prefer to be divine past the dictates of time. “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries” is a room containing infinite doorways opening up into each different second in existence. The portray is a monad, embodying previous and future in a continuing current, a distilling of absolutely the second which reveals not how life is lived, however the way it exists in eternity.
Clara Peeters, “Table with a cloth, salt cellar, gilt tazza, pie, jug, porcelain dish with olives, and roast fowl” (c. 1611), oil on panel, on view at El Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain (picture public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Bread sticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher” (1611), oil on panel, at view on El Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain (picture public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
