Still life of fruit, dead birds and a monkey, by Clara Peeters

Clara Peeters's Still Life of Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1616) is a virtuoso example of the early Flemish and Dutch still life tradition at a moment when it was asserting its independence as a major genre. Peeters was among the first specialists in still life painting and one of the very few women artists to achieve recognition in Flemish seventeenth-century painting. The combination of fruit, dead game birds, and a live monkey reflects the genre's early delight in accumulating different categories of natural things — domestic, wild, exotic — in a single display of painterly skill. Monkeys, rare imported animals, added an element of exotic spectacle and were sometimes used as symbols of imitation.

Peeters builds the still life through careful tonal modeling and precise observation of varied surface textures: the bloom of fruit skin, feathers, and the monkey's fur. Her palette is rich and warm, with controlled highlights defining round forms against shadowed backgrounds. The compositional arrangement balances symmetry with casual profusion.