She found an unidentified painting in storage. It turned out to be a female still-life master's work

When art historian and curator Cynthia Osiecki stumbled upon an unattributed still-life painting in an Oslo museum storeroom in 2022, she couldn't shake the feeling that she knew exactly who created it.

"We were trying to buy a work by Clara Peeters, like many museums are trying to purchase women artists at the moment,” said Osiecki, who had been studying the work of the pioneering 17th-century Flemish Baroque artist.

When she spotted the painting, Osiecki wondered if it could be a long-lost work by Peeters.

“I mean, it’s almost too good to be true to have a Clara Peeters hanging right in your storage while the museum was actively looking for women artists on the art market,” Osiecki said. “Instead of having to purchase one, we might have had one all this time and right under our nose and didn’t even know it.”

Despite her groundbreaking work, the enigmatic artist remains relatively unknown to the wider public, a fate shared by many female artists of her time, Osiecki says.

That's part of the reason why the National Museum of Norway is putting a spotlight on historic female artists, with Woman Painter opening in Oslo on Oct. 8. The show will feature works by 19 female artists who worked across northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650, including Judith Leyster, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, and, of course, Peeters.

The piece Osiecki discovered, titled Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza , had once been believed to be the work of Ambrosius Brueghel, a member of a famous family of artists in Antwerp, Belgium. It was later reclassified as "anonymous" and sent to storage.

Earlier this year, however, it was officially reattributed to Peeters, a painstaking journey spanning several years, Osiecki says.

When she first discovered painting, Osiecki found some telltale clues.

Along with being one of the earliest specialists of still-life painting of her era, Peeters was known for embedding her own likeness into everyday objects in her works. She did this by painting tiny self-portraits in the shiny surfaces of pewter jugs, fruits or vegetables — subtly claiming ownership and asserting her own professional identity in a male-dominated world, Osiecki says.

The Oslo painting features nine dead birds — considered a delicacy in the 17th-century, Osiecki says — freshly-picked hazelnuts and apricots.

“In our grapes, there is a reflection of a person, but it’s not in any way as detailed as those silhouettes are on other paintings by [Peeters'] hand,” said Osiecki.

Then there were other details that caught her eye — the tazza , a saucer-like drinking vessel from the period that Peeters frequently featured in her paintings — as well as the distinctive positioning of the birds within the composition, Osiecki says.

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