Clara Peeters
18 June through 2 October 2016 at the Rockox House Museum
The Rockox House and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) are organising a series of small-scale exhibitions as part of the Golden Cabinet initiative. Clara Peeters:Dinner is served! is number six.
Clara Peeters was an outsider – one of the few female fine artists in the early seventeenth century, not to mention a pioneer in the development of still life as a genre.
We know very little about her life.She worked in Antwerp in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and a mere forty paintings have been attributed to her. Her still lifes – banquets, fish platters and bouquets – are a feast for the eye. But what is their deeper meaning? What was the value of Chinese porcelain to a middle-class household in 1610? What made her combine an artichoke with other delicacies and exquisite objects? Clara Peeters: Dinner is served! sets out to answer these and other questions evoked by the sometimes enigmatic work of this fascinating artist.
This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Prado Museum in Madrid.
The exhibition will move to the Prado in the autumn.
