A curator at the National Museum in Oslo has attributed a long-overlooked still-life painting to Clara Peeters, a Flemish Baroque artist who was one of the few women known to have worked as a professional painter in early 17th-century Antwerp. The painting, catalogued in the museum's collection as Still Life with small game and grapes on a gilded tazza and dated to around 1620, had sat under an assumed attribution — the museum's own records listed it as attributed to Peeters, but the painting had never been publicly foregrounded as a work by her hand (Artnews; The Guardian).

Peeters, active in Antwerp in the first decades of the 1600s, is recognised by art historians as a pioneer of the breakfast-piece — a type of still life depicting arranged food and tableware on a partially cleared table. Her works are held by institutions including the Prado in Madrid and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, but she remains far less widely known than male contemporaries such as Jan Brueghel the Elder or Frans Snyders.

The painting in question shows small game and grapes arranged on a gilded tazza — a shallow ornamental cup — and is held by the National Museum under the accession number NG.M.00158 (Nasjonalmuseet). Norway's National Museum, the institution formed in 2022 from the merger of four legacy collections, holds the country's largest public art collection.

The reattribution comes ahead of an exhibition at the museum. Titled "W̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ Painter," the show runs from 8 October 2026 to 7 February 2027 and positions pioneering women artists as central figures in Europe's art scene rather than marginal ones (Nasjonalmuseet). The struck-through "Woman" in the title gestures at the way these artists were often defined — and constrained — by their gender rather than their craft.

For a painting that has lingered in storage under a tentative label, the timing is deliberate. The exhibition provides a platform to present the Peeters work to a public audience, and the curator's research gives it a firmer footing in the collection. Whether the broader art-historical community will accept the attribution without further technical analysis — such as pigment sampling or dendrochronology, the tree-ring dating of the oak panel — is a question for specialists. For now, the museum is putting the painting forward as a Peeters, and the public will see it this autumn.

What makes the story resonate beyond Oslo is the figure at its centre. Peeters was signing her own work at a time when most women painters went uncredited or worked under a male relative's name. A painting pulled from obscurity four centuries later is, in its own quiet way, a correction — one of many that museums across Europe are undertaking as they re-examine what their storerooms hold.