Poultry near the ruins of a mill

In 1870, with the Franco-Prussian War closing on Paris, Monticelli left the city on foot and walked south to Marseille, and he never lived in the capital again. This picture dates from 1872, near the start of those long Provencal years, and its subject sits about as far from fashionable Paris as you can get, a few hens and a rooster scratching in the dirt beside a broken-down mill. He builds the whole thing from quick, thick touches, the birds' feathers and the crumbling stone laid on with the same loaded brush. The ruin stays vague, more a warm mass of ochre and shadow than an architectural record. What held him was the light on the ground and the small commotion of the poultry, the ordinary life of the countryside he had come back to.