The city of Gouda in Holland has acquired a monopoly on the Dutch cheese trade of 1395, selling its eponymous dairy product for more than two centuries before Clara Peeters applies oil on canvas. Contemporary viewers of “natural nature with cheeses, artichokes and cherries”, painted between 1612 and 1618 and now exposed to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would have instantly recognized the cheese – all the Dutch who were worth his salt knew that the flavor of subtle hazelnut and the butter snotdine of a gouda. In its composition, Peeters presents a carefully cleaned wheel wrapped in a thin layer of shiny red wax, seeming to shine in contrast with a dark background, as if it had been generated by the void itself. It is the only largest product in the paint, dominating the composition of its seat on a maculé tin dish, its marbled surface dotted with small sparkling salt crystals, its strict surface of slight irregular gradations of its resistant encounter with a chisel.
The color of the gouda is tinged with a pleasant orange, its slight tan differentiating it from the greenish brown of a Herb cheese Coin flavored with parsley and a block of friable, greyish Trappist cheese, which is positioned in front and above, respectively. Balanced at the top of the Trappist cheese is a blue and white porcelain plate with thick butter ribbons marked by the knife of the knife used to scrape it with the hook. A round and gilded roll is placed in front of the cheese table, while an artichoke in a freshly cut half, its interior leaves passing from pink to the heart of the heart with exterior tears in a limit erotic display, dominates the left. Behind the fleshy artichoke is a tin pillar, decorated in exquisite flowering conceptions, a pinch of sparkling salt and diamondoufère at the top. Dispected in front of the meal are several lurid red cherries, some still connected by their stems. “Still life with cheeses, artichokes and cherries” It is not only an image of life – it is something more. Peeters captured, with a disturbing likelihood, a moment of pure and crystalline time.
Before looking at a composition of peeters, we must think about the broader context of the kind of still life. Rejected as a simple demonstration of the technique (which in the case of Peeters was considerable) or as a kind of modern luxury advertising – all these canvases with poultry and fruits, cheese and nuts – works in this variety are too often transmitted as pictorial ephemers. Although the genre has a story dating from antiquity and painters of Carage has Cézanne Practiced the form, there remains a tendency to interpret immobile lives as impressive exercises more than artistic expression. Even when the genre receives critical attention, the aesthetic judgment of Dutch examples – operates by Willem Claesz, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Kalf and Peeters, for example – is often subsumed in sociological Or historical Readings. In these interpretations, the astonishing precision of the black is understood as the reflection of Dutch secularism encouraged by the Calvinist reform, which replaced the potentially idolatrous religious subjects with fruits and vegetables; Or a celebration of the deep wealth of the Netherlands, the worldly treasures of merchandise from the capitalist Republic emerging in the form of Dutch cheese and Chinese porcelain, Italian wine and Hanseatic salt. As Sybille Ebert-Schiffer says Still nature: a story (1999), criticism historically recorded painters of dead life to “the lowest rank among artists”, interpreting their compositions as “symptomatic of a decline in artistic taste”.
This was perhaps due to the low status of the genre that it was one of the rare forms that opened so that women demonstrated their talents – which kicks did, establishing a reputation as a genius painter in a field dominated by men. We know little about his biography; Although she is most likely from Antwerp, she does not seem to have been a member of the Saint-Luc guild, the brotherhood of painters in this city. She may have trained under the comparable painter of Brilliant de Still Life Osias Beert, or even Jan Brueghel the elder, but he was also hypothesized that Peeters had directed his own artistic school. No matter how or where they were manufactured, 31 paintings are supported by its signature and more than 100 are allocated to it. Among these, it is possible that more than a dozen were rendered before the Peeters who are 18 years old – a real child prodigy. Although it was known in its time for its “precise and meticulous representations of nature, which include small details such as dew drops and insect bites”, as Julia Binswanger writes in Smithsonian MagazineShe has been largely forgotten for centuries before being resurrected recently in learned circles, with exhibitions of her work organized in institutions such as The Prado.
The philosophical importance of the work of peeters, however, crosses all quarrels of interpretation and even historical constraints as clean as a knife closes cheese. Even if institutionalized chauvinism has made religious or historical subjects which were prohibited to it, its still lives broke out of the present clarity. Still nature, as its name suggests, immobile life – it displays a divorced time slice of the whole; He calms the whirlwinds and the whirlpools that make up the tumult of existence. Far from a simple exercise of domesticity and mercantilism, a resident follower is capable of temporal defamonne – Basically, it makes reality strange. Examine “still life with cheeses, artichokes and cherries” Or a number of other compositions by peeters, such as “table with a fabric, a salt cellar, a golden tizza, a tart, a jug, a porcelain dish with olives and a roasted poultry” (c. 1611) or the foamous not signed with crab, shrimp and lobster “(c. 1635–40), and it becomes clear that they all share not only incongruity in the arrangement of objects, but a particular relationship with color, especially light and obscurity. as Alejandro Vergara-Sharp-Sharp Clara Peeters (2025),, The painter is masterful in the combination of objects of different colors, in particular by framing darkness and light unlike others. In each case, the result is a painting that is disturbing, if not strange. All these cheese wheels and shrimp trays, bouquets of flowers and almond bowls, float in an undifferentiated darkness as if they existed in eternity. The screen of these paintings comes precisely from the surprising precision of the existence represented.
Even when Peeters uses the form of still life to express a vanity Position, which is common in the genre, its paintings are a kingdom where this cheese will never mold and these cherries are forever free from rot. Entropy is won over in its frames, and therefore its paintings become reminders how strange the flow of this medium is. These borders of darkness – this undifferentiated nothingness present in the vast majority of his works – are used to isolate his elements, as if a single second could be preserved forever as a sample, a specimen, an artifact. This is so obsessive in these compositions: they present us the singular strangeness of the moment.
“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, as simple, which does not change every moment,” writes the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1903 An introduction to metaphysics. As existence is really experienced, he suggests, we all enter new rivers forever and noting that we cannot go home. Remategality is the deep illusion of Peeters' works: the action has been interrupted in such exquisite details as it has the impression of being pierced. In its 1615 “mother nature with cheeses, almonds and Bretzels”, in which its reflection can be accompanied by the tin handle of a jug (in sight at the Mauritshuis museum, in The Hague, in the Netherlands); “Still life with flowers, a silver cup, dried fruits, sweets, bread sticks, wine and a tin pitcher” (1611, held at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain); or “Table with a fabric, a salt cellar, a golden tizza, a tart, a jug, a porcelain dish with olives and a roasted poultry” (c. 1611, in sight at El Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain), The present is isolated from action, which is no longer in a relationship with the past or in the future – and therefore to the clearest evocation of what it would be to be divine beyond time. “Still life with cheeses, artichokes and cherries” is a piece containing endless doors that open at all other moments of existence. Painting is a monad, embodying the past and the future in a continuous present, a distillation of the absolute moment which reveals not how life is lived, but how it exists in eternity.
