Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail

c. 1610

Clara Peeters

Painter, Flemish, c. 1594 - c. 1640

A glass holding a loose bouquet of flowers set within an oval is surrounded by eight insects against an off-white surface in this vertical still life painting. It is impossible to tell whether the oval is an opening piercing the white surface or if the still life is an oval-shaped painting sitting on top of the white surface. The glass holding the flowers has straight, slightly flaring sides with a ring of textured knubs around the bottom third. Flowers in the glass include a white lily of the valley, yellow and purple violet, blue grape hyacinth, yellow narcissus, red poppy, upside-down cup-shaped pink snake’s head fritillary, and stems of greenery. The bouquet is lit from the left, and a ray of light focused by the glass falls across the back edge of the wooden ledge on which the glass sits. Two drops of water bead on the ledge, and the artist signed the front face of the ledge, “CLARA P.” The background behind the flowers within the oval is black. The bugs on the white surface are much larger in scale, painted precisely so anatomical details can be made out. Across the top are a dragonfly with a green body, a house fly with red eyes, and a dragonfly with a red body. A fuzzy caterpillar is to the left of the oval and a hornet is to the right. Across the bottom are a snail, a ladybug, and a beetle with a black body and red wings and legs.

Media Options

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on copper

  • Credit Line

    The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 16.6 × 13.5 cm (6 9/16 × 5 5/16 in.)
    framed: 25.4 × 22.86 × 3.81 cm (10 × 9 × 1 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    2018.144.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Sale, Oger & Camper, Paris, 17 October 2011, no. 86, as Attributed to Clara Peeters); (David Koetser Gallery, Zurich); sold 2013 to Baron Willem van Dedem [1929-2015], London; (his estate sale, Sotheby's, London, 4 July 2018, no. 25); purchased by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2021

  • Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2021, no. 22, repro.

Bibliography

2020

  • Libby, Alexandra. “From Personal Treasures to Public Gifts: The Flemish Painting Collection at the National Gallery of Art.” In America and the Art of Flanders: Collecting Paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and their Circles, edited by Esmée Quodbach. The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America 5. University Park, 2020: 130, 131 color fig. 75, 143.

2021

  • Wieseman, Marjorie E. "Clouds, Ice, Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings." Art for the Nation no. 63 (Spring/Summer 2021): 28, repro.

Inscriptions

lower center, on front of the table: CLARA P

Wikidata ID

Q58690437


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