A Bouquet of Flowers in a Roemer Glass, Surrounded by Insects and a Snail

A new discovery

The present painting, a gem-like work on a small copper, is an important newly discovered addition to Clara Peeters’ oeuvre. Within a dark central oval medallion, a roemer glass stands on a stone ledge that carries Clara’s signature. It holds a delicate, colourful bouquet, dominated by a large pink peony and a yellow-red variegated tulip, with blue borage, daisies, a horned pansy and a red tulip. The medallion is surrounded by a vellum-coloured margin holding eight tiny creatures: a small spider, a damselfly, a hoverfly, a snail, a ground beetle, a small tortoiseshell butterfly, a ladybird and a dark bee. Artful and artificial, the image deliberately disregards the realism of most flower pieces of the period, and casts out lines towards the graphic arts.

Another painting by Clara, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is likewise painted on a copper measuring 16.5 × 13.5 cm and shows a twin composition: a bouquet in a glass on a signed stone ledge, within a dark oval surrounded by insects and a snail on an off-white ground. A Paris sale catalogue of 28 April 1780 records, under a single lot, ‘two paintings depicting vases filled with flowers by Clara, & surrounded by insects by Van Kessel’, on copper and of exactly these dimensions. Since no other such works by Peeters are known, it seems plausible that the Washington and Lilian paintings are the pair from that sale – the auctioneer, unfamiliar with Clara Peeters, attributing the insects to Jan van Kessel, who was born only in 1626.

The pictorial roots of these pendants lie in the work of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) and his son Jacob, whose illuminations of flowers and insects within oval frames carried a strongly religious meaning. In 1614, moreover, the French printmaker Jacques Hurtu published ornamental goldsmith designs showing precisely such a symmetrical oval arrangement surrounded by insects – a credible direct source for Clara’s two paintings, which would suggest a dating in or after 1614.