Die Truthähne

In 1876 the department-store magnate Ernest Hoschedé, a keen early buyer of the Impressionists, invited Monet to his country estate at Montgeron, south of Paris, and asked him to paint four large panels for the château's grand drawing room. This is one of them, and it's a strange choice of subject for a stately decoration, white turkeys pecking across a meadow with the mansion's own facade rising small in the background. Monet showed it in 1877 at the third Impressionist exhibition, openly labelled an unfinished decoration. Within a year Hoschedé was bankrupt and the panels were scattered. His wife Alice and her children would eventually move in with the Monets, and years later, after Ernest's death, she and Monet married.