Buried for not being Brueghel: overlooked masterpiece by still-life pioneer discovered in storage area

The curator of Norway’s national museum in Oslo is bringing the work by the Flemish baroque artist Clara Peeters out of obscurity in a major exhibition of female artists

Anonymous was often a woman: so said Virginia Woolf. And so thought Cynthia Osiecki one day in 2022, when she chanced on an unattributed still life in the storage area of the National Museum of Norway in Oslo.

Osiecki had been studying the work of a renowned 17th-century Flemish artist, Clara Peeters, one of the earliest practitioners of still life painting. Works by Peeters hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.