The National Museum of Norway has officially reattributed a 17th-century still life to the Flemish painter Clara Peeters, following a discovery in museum storage by curator Cynthia Osiecki in 2022. The painting, titled Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, was created around 1620 and is now slated as a star exhibit in the museum's upcoming exhibition "Woman Painter," opening on 8 October 2026 (The Guardian).

Osiecki encountered the unattributed panel in storage and built the case for Peeters' authorship using material and compositional evidence. The wooden panel came from a supplier Peeters frequently used. The gilded tazza depicted in the composition matches similar vessels in other Peeters works, and the positioning of the dead birds, grapes, and hazelnuts aligns closely with her established practice (The Guardian).

The absence of a signature had long obscured the painting's origins. The bottom edge of the panel, where Peeters typically placed her signature, had been eaten away by woodworm damage. The composition itself depicts nine freshly dead birds alongside hazelnuts, apricots, and a fly perched on a bunch of grapes. Beyond the surface imagery, Osiecki noticed shapes on the grapes that resemble outlines of human figures, possibly a miniature self-portrait. Peeters was known for embedding such miniature self-portraits within her still-life compositions (The Guardian).

The attribution history of the Oslo painting reflects shifting connoisseurship standards over the past two centuries. The work was acquired by the National Museum of Norway in 1845 (National Museum of Norway). At one point it was attributed to the Antwerp artist Ambrosius Brueghel, but early-20th-century cataloguers reclassified it as the work of an anonymous artist. The museum's online collection records list the painting, measuring 33.5 cm high and 49.5 cm wide, with an assumed attribution to Peeters (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway).

Clara Peeters, thought to have been born in Antwerp around 1594 and dead before 1657, is recognized as one of the earliest practitioners of still-life painting (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway). Her godmother was Spanish, a biographical detail that has informed scholarly interest in her cross-regional reception (The Low Countries). Works by Peeters currently hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Prado staged a dedicated exhibition, "The Art of Clara Peeters," in 2016 (The Guardian; Museo del Prado).

The reattribution also arrives alongside a new scholarly publication. The National Museum of Norway library added the 2025 publication Clara Peeters by Alejandro Vergara-Sharp of the Museo Nacional del Prado to its new books collection (National Museum of Norway).

The "Woman Painter" exhibition (titled Malerinne in Norwegian) features female artists working across northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650. It presents some fifty religious paintings, portraits, and still lifes by 19 artists, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Michaelina Wautier, and Peeters (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway).

The broader context here is the ongoing institutional effort to reconstruct and re-evaluate the female canon of the early modern period. For experts, the Oslo reattribution is less an isolated curatorial correction than a data point in a cumulative scholarly enterprise, one materially supported by panel dendrochronology and provenance research that was largely unavailable to early-20th-century cataloguers. When an object's attribution is revised, it reshapes the oeuvre, recalibrates questions of workshop practice versus autograph execution, and feeds directly into connoisseurship networks. The material evidence Osiecki assembled, specifically the supplier match for the panel and the compositional parallels, links a painting long held in collection limbo back to a named artistic practice.