Still Life with a Peregrine Falcon and Birds

This skillfully executed painting by Clara Peeters represents a majestic peregrine falcon with its prey, arranged on a tabletop. The dark background highlights the soft plumage of the falcon. Proudly standing on the breast of a grey partridge, his talons firmly clutching his prey while his gaze, accentuated by the glittering reflections, rests on the beholder. The diversity of feather textures is depicted with great skill. The accurate depiction of the birds’ anatomy and proportions enables their identification, reflecting Peeters’s meticulous observation of the natural world. Peeters is one of the few women artists known to have worked professionally in the seventeenth century. Thirty-nine known paintings bear her signature, and this painting is one of the rare examples of her work that has survived to the present day. She was among the first artists to popularise still life paintings at the beginning of the seventeenth century and is regarded as one of the pioneers of falconry pieces (50 Favorites in the SMK Collection).