The National Museum of Norway has officially credited a 17th-century painting to the Flemish artist Clara Peeters, after curator Cynthia Osiecki found the unattributed work sitting in museum storage in 2022. The painting, Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, was created around 1620. It will be a star piece in the museum's upcoming exhibition "Woman Painter," which opens on 8 October 2026 (The Guardian).

To figure out who painted it, Osiecki looked at both the materials and the way the picture was arranged. The wooden board the painting sits on came from a supplier Peeters used often. The gilded tazza — a fancy shallow cup on a stand — shown in the painting matches similar cups in other Peeters works. The way the dead birds, grapes, and hazelnuts are placed also matches her usual style (The Guardian).

The painting had no signature, which is why nobody knew who made it for so long. The bottom edge of the wooden board, where Peeters normally signed her name, had been eaten away by woodworms. The painting shows nine dead birds along with hazelnuts, apricots, and a fly resting on some grapes. Osiecki also noticed tiny shapes on the grapes that look like human figures, which could be a miniature self-portrait. Peeters was known for hiding tiny pictures of herself inside her paintings (The Guardian).

The painting's history of who was credited with it shows how much the art world's methods have changed over the past two hundred years. The National Museum of Norway bought the painting in 1845 (National Museum of Norway). At one point it was attributed to the Antwerp artist Ambrosius Brueghel, but early-20th-century cataloguers later decided it was by an unknown artist. The museum's online records now list the painting — which is 33.5 cm tall and 49.5 cm wide — with an assumed attribution to Peeters (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway).

Clara Peeters is thought to have been born in Antwerp around 1594 and to have died before 1657. She is recognized as one of the very first painters to focus on still-life painting — pictures of everyday objects like food, flowers, and tableware (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway). Her godmother was Spanish, a detail that has drawn scholarly interest in how her work was received across different countries (The Low Countries). Peeters' paintings currently hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Prado held a dedicated exhibition, "The Art of Clara Peeters," in 2016 (The Guardian; Museo del Prado).

The reattribution also comes alongside new scholarly attention to Peeters. The National Museum of Norway library recently added a 2025 book called 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 (called Malerinne in Norwegian) features female artists from northern Europe and Italy who worked between 1550 and 1650. It includes about fifty religious paintings, portraits, and still lifes by 19 artists, among them Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Michaelina Wautier, and Peeters (The Guardian; National Museum of Norway).

The broader context here is a wider effort by museums and scholars to find and re-evaluate work by women artists from the early modern period. For experts, the Oslo reattribution is not an isolated fix but part of a gradual, long-term project — one made possible by research tools like tree-ring dating of wooden panels and provenance research (tracing a painting's ownership history) that were not available to cataloguers a century ago. When a painting's attribution changes, it reshapes the list of works tied to that artist, raises new questions about whether the painter made it personally or it came from their workshop, and feeds into the wider network of art experts who study these questions. The evidence Osiecki put together — the matching panel supplier and the compositional parallels — connects a painting that sat in collection limbo back to a named artist's known body of work.