 This lecture is entitled Clara Peters and the Flemish Still Life, or you can think of today's lecture as why should I care about pictures of food and flowers? Well, still life paintings are essentially images of foodstuffs or plant life. Sometimes you see flowers, sometimes food, and usually you also see the kind of non-perishable objects that go along with that. Phases, plates, silverware, glasses, so on and so forth, and it can really vary greatly. So, you might be asking yourself, can a painting of that sort of arrangement of objects really mean anything? Well, the answer is definitely. For example, let's take a look at these objects on the screen here. Now, I want you to take a second and imagine yourself at a fancy dinner party. Perhaps you're seated at a table setting much like the image we see on the left, right over here. So, look at this place setting in front of you. Your imagined hosts have gone to quite a lot of trouble to impress you. They've made very deliberate choices in the items they've put in front of you, and not only in the food that they're serving you, but in the whole arrangement. See, up here we have a nice crystal goblet. We have nice fancy napkins, right, and tablecloths. There's flour on the table and some plants out in the background suggesting an arrangement of some sort. You even have a fancy silver napkin ring, these pretty crystal salt and pepper shakers that match your goblet, and on and on and on. I mean, even notice you have the fancy garnish on your plate, a little parsley garnish. So, clearly choices have been made by your hosts. This isn't just the obvious choice that would be made. They had to think about, what do I want to do for my guest? And, you know, think about the choices they could have made that they didn't make. They could have given you a bowl of marinated chicken and said, hey, let's go to the backyard and grill these together, right, a casual get-together in someone's backyard. Instead of your fancy goblet, you could have had a red plastic cup that someone gave you at a countertop, instead of this fancy crystal setting at a table. So these are very clear, deliberate choices, and those choices mean something. They're made for a reason. So, in this example, the choices are presumably made because this is a fancy dinner party, perhaps celebrating something, a holiday maybe. Whereas if the choices on the right had been made, this modest cup or the chicken that you're going to grill together with your friend in the backyard, that suggests a more casual, easygoing night. So, choices are being made. And, you know, perhaps we could even read into this a little bit more. Maybe your hosts are trying to show off, show you what nice things they have. Or maybe there's some sort of symbolism imbued in the food or the flowers that suggests the religious beliefs or the cultural traditions of your hosts. So there's a wide range of possible meanings just in this simple table setting. And the same exact choices and meanings are at work in still life paintings. And often there's even more than you could imagine. So let's now take a look at Clara Peters, who is after all the subject of today's lecture. So here we see a probable self-portrait of Clara Peters, and this is from a painting she did around 1610. And she is really one of the most famous still life painters from Flanders, which in itself is really impressive because, what do you notice about her immediately? She's a woman. And in 1610 that was still a pretty big deal if you were a woman and you were one of the most successful painters in a particular genre. So that's, you know, she's already passed a ton of hurdles, cultural hurdles of her time. We don't know a whole lot about her life, except for the fact that she was very successful. And also the fact that her still life paintings were very influential on the development of other still life painters in Flanders. And still life painting was becoming more and more popular in Flanders at the time. She's famous for a particular type of still life painting, and it's known as the breakfast piece. Breakfast piece. And a breakfast piece was simply a still life that showed luxury items. The kind of luxury items the merchant class would have enjoyed, and that's the same merchant class who would have been buying her still life and hanging them on the wall of their home. So let's write that down. Luxury objects, the kind enjoyed by the merchant class. Merchant. So like our hypothetical hosts, Clara Peters had definite choices to make whenever she painted a still life. And you should try and keep those in your mind as we look at one specific example of her still life painting. And also whenever you encounter a Baroque still life in the coming lectures and readings that we have assigned. So choices that she might have made. Let's scroll down a little bit so we have some room to write, and you can take a look at this one example. So here's an example of Clara Peters still life. And before we take a look at specific details within the painting, let's think about the questions she had to ask herself. Things like the condition of objects that she's depicting. And by that I mean is it something shiny and new? Is it something that shows a lot of wear? Think about the order of their arrangement. Is it really neat and tidy and organized or is it a little more chaotic or haphazard? What about the relationship? Relationship of objects to one another as well as to us to the viewer. And then think about choices made in terms of textures, texture and color. Light and shade are always big questions in the Baroque. And also what about the setting? So those are just a few questions to keep in mind as we take a look at Clara Peters still life here, which dates to 1611. Now, we can safely assume that Clara Peters didn't just stumble upon a tabletop that looked like this and just paint what she saw. She carefully arranged her canvas. And one of the first things I notice when I look at this and this relates to this last question I wrote here of setting. Can you determine what the setting of this is? Not really. It kind of just emerges from this murky dark background and all of our focus is on these objects. There's no distracting details of a suggested room or even an outdoor space. It's just the objects on this table, which really keeps our attention on those objects, these luxury objects. So we have here, you can see right away, we have flowers, we have pretzels over here, nuts. And then we have these goblets and glasses and vases arranged on the table as well. You might notice, even though it's pretty simple and straightforward, just these few objects on a flat surface. She's really placed things very interestingly and you can see that especially if you look at the front. We can see the edge of this tabletop and it's almost as though it's coming into our space and there are objects perilously close to the edge and sort of falling off like the leaves of this flower here, this tray with the pretzels on it. And hopefully that will trigger something in your mind and make you think, oh, that's really Baroque, right? Because it creates the sense of immediacy and movement as though these objects could perhaps tumble into our space and there's that sense of theatricality and the sense of time that's so, so typical of the Baroque. Think back to Bernini's sculptures, for example, that really capture that moment in time. Well, Clara Peters is doing the same thing in her own way with these objects in the still life. Now, the objects are very indicative of a well-to-do Flemish home. These are not throwaway items at all. Notice the delicate details on this metal goblet in the front and this vase over here. They're not just everyday boring housewares. They're nice. They're luxurious. And again, that fits with who her clients would have been and the people who would buy these paintings. Notice also that her attention to textural details adds to that immediacy I was talking about a little bit before. And it also shows a connection to the Northern Renaissance past her predecessors who were so interested in capturing textural details of various objects in their paintings. So you can see, for example, the real softness of these flowers, the velvety softness versus the cool rough metal of this goblet, the matte surface of the tabletop and so on and so forth. So this paid careful attention to that. So back to the question we posed at the beginning of this lecture. Why should you care? Well, we can assume again that Peters, as well as the people who bought her paintings, valued the objects in these paintings. They meant something to the culture in which this painting was produced. And also it's important that people were buying works of art like this for their homes, which shows the importance of art at the time and the really significant shift away from only these large scale important religious paintings that we're so used to studying over the course of art history. We're moving into a time when people are buying art for their homes and that's a really significant shift. At any rate, this is the early stage of a tradition that would continue for centuries. And we're going to take a look at some more important still life painters in the coming lectures.