Clara Peeters

Look closely at the polished pewter and silver in a Clara Peeters still life and you may catch a tiny woman looking back, brush and palette in hand. She painted these miniature self-portraits into the reflections on her goblets and jugs, sometimes half a dozen at once on a single curved surface, a quiet way to sign a picture and to insist that a woman had made it.

Peeters was working in Antwerp in the early 1600s, when the Flemish still life was just taking shape, and she became one of its pioneers, laying out breakfast tables of cheese, fish, and flowers with a jeweller's patience. Very little of her life is documented. Even her birth and death years are uncertain, and only a few dozen signed works survive.

Four of them hang in the Prado in Madrid, and in 2016 the museum built its first solo exhibition of a woman painter around her, nearly 200 years after it opened. The show gathered the goblets, coins, and shells she had painted, and sent visitors hunting for the little watching faces tucked into the metal.