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A still life painting on panel by Flemish artist Clara Peeters (1594- After 1654) representing a plate of cheese, a jug and bread fetched a record price of 10,1 million FF (US $ 1,684 million ) at auction in Paris on June 3rd 1998.
The painting, measuring 34,5 x 49 cm, had been kept in the same family for over 75 years and was in remarkable condition. Carrying a pre-sale estimate of 1,5 million FF ($ 250,000) it was bought by an Anglo-Saxon dealer in a sale conducted by auctioneer Marc Ferri at Drouot.
Such price was the highest fetched for any old master painting in the past four years in Paris.
There were already four known cheese still-life by Clara Peeters and the one sold in Drouot was certainly her best work and even one of her great masterpieces. In this work, like van Eyck almost two centuries before her Clara Peeters painted her self-portrait seen reflecting on the pewter cover of the jug. She was one of the first artists of the first half of the 17th Century to do so.
As in many still lifes of that time representations of cheese were rich of a religious and social symbolism. All the details in that work recall vanity and the shortness of human life.
Clara Peeters, whose life is still not well known, had a great influence over many Flemish and even Dutch artists. The price recorded for this painting places her amongst the greatest such as Osias Beert, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Abraham Mignon, Balthasar van der Ast, Pieter Claesz, Jan Brueghel the Younger, Jan Brueghel called Velvet, Jacob van Hulsdonck, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Claes Heda, Jan van Huysum and 18th and 19th Century French painters Chardin and Redouté whose works have more than once been sold beyond the $ 1 million mark.
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