The National Museum of Norway has officially reattributed a 17th-century still life to the Flemish painter Clara Peeters, after curator Cynthia Osiecki discovered the unattributed panel in museum storage in 2022. The painting, Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, dates to around 1620 and will be a centerpiece of the museum's upcoming exhibition "Woman Painter," opening on 8 October 2026 (The Guardian).

Osiecki built the case for Peeters' authorship using material and compositional evidence. The wooden panel the painting sits on came from a supplier Peeters regularly used. The gilded tazza — a shallow ornamental cup on a stem — matches similar vessels in other Peeters works. The arrangement of dead birds, grapes, and hazelnuts also aligns closely with her known practice (The Guardian).

The painting had long lacked a signature, which kept its origins hidden. The bottom edge of the panel, where Peeters typically signed her name, had been eaten away by woodworm damage. The composition shows nine freshly dead birds alongside hazelnuts, apricots, and a fly resting on a bunch of grapes. Looking more closely, Osiecki noticed shapes on the grapes that resemble human figures — possibly a miniature self-portrait. Peeters was known for embedding tiny self-portraits within her still-life paintings (The Guardian).

The painting's attribution history mirrors how standards in art authentication have shifted over the past two centuries. The National Museum of Norway acquired the work in 1845 (National Museum of Norway). At one point it was credited to the Antwerp artist Ambrosius Brueghel, but early-20th-century cataloguers later reclassified it as the work of an anonymous artist. The museum's online collection records now 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, believed to have been born in Antwerp around 1594 and to have died 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 drawn scholarly attention to her reception across different regions (The Low Countries). Peeters' works 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 coincides with new scholarly interest in Peeters. The National Museum of Norway library recently 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 supported by panel dendrochronology (the study of tree-ring patterns in wood panels to date them) and provenance research that was largely unavailable to early-20th-century cataloguers. When an object's attribution changes, it reshapes the body of work associated with an artist, recalibrates questions about workshop practice versus autograph execution (whether the artist painted it personally or it came from their studio assistants), and feeds directly into connoisseurship networks. The material evidence Osiecki assembled — the supplier match for the panel and the compositional parallels — links a painting long held in collection limbo back to a named artistic practice.