A vividly depicted basket of flowers painted by Clara Peeters, a Dutch master painter of still life, will head to a Sotheby's auction in London on Dec. 6 to fetch around an estimated price of £500,000 to £700,000, or upwards of $631,000 to $883,000.
The originally unnamed painting, estimated to have been painted around 1615, is one of the few pieces by Peeters that she has painted on copper. Sotheby's, who has dubbed the painting "Still life of roses, carnations, tulips, narcissi, irises, love-in-a-mist, larkspur, and other flowers, in a wicker basket, with a butterfly and a cricket," will include the piece on its "Old Master & 19th Century Paintings" evening auction.
The Shrouded Master of Still Life, Clara Peeters
To date, there are only about 40 works known to have been painted by Peeters, whose life remains scarcely documented. The piece was reportedly part of a private collection in Belgium since 1928, which has barred the painting away from public knowledge for almost a century.
In a statement to The Guardian, Sotheby's representative Chloe Stead expressed how Peeters have been "forgotten for such a long time" despite the "extraordinary quality" of the painter's handiwork. Not to mention the undeniable artistic influence that Peeters had as a female pioneer of the still-life genre.
The Dutch painter herself is widely successful, with her paintings reaching notoriety outside of Antwerp, where the artist was known to have lived. In fact, Peeters' work was even included in the royal collection of Madrid. According to Stead, Peeters' paintings were considered to be "prized objects" and were passed around due to their value.
"Which makes it so remarkable that she - like so many of her female contemporaries - were, over the centuries thereafter, written out of art history," Stead added.
Sales Records of Clara Peeters Paintings
Currently, the artist's "Still Life with Pitcher and Cheese Plate" painting is her highest-valued work, selling in a Paris auction in 1998 for an outstanding $1.7 million against an initial valuation of around $337,000.
Her second-highest auction high, and latest auctioned painting, was sold for $1.5 million. The piece that was given the name "Roses, lilies, an iris and other flowers in an earthenware vase, with a pot of carnations and a butterfly on a ledge," was auctioned at a Christy's sale in New York in 2022, against a primary low valuation of $1.2 million.
If the current high estimate of the wicker basket painting by Peeters was realized, the piece would be ranked among her third-highest in terms of price, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her piece "Still life with pears, an apple, an apricot, almonds, and walnuts on a Tazza with grapes, a walnut, an apricot, cherries and almonds on a stone ledge," which fetched around $882,000 at a past Sotheby's London auction back in 2007.
