Turkey Girl

Turkeys reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century, and by Pissarro's time French farms kept them in flocks that were driven out after the harvest to pick over the fields for fallen grain. Keeping the birds together with a long switch was often work for a girl. Pissarro painted her in 1884. She leans against a tree trunk with the stick held low and looks away from the flock, while behind her the flat field runs out to a few stacks and a church tower small on the horizon. He did it in tempera on paper rather than oil on canvas, a paint that dries quickly to a matt surface, yet the sheet is the size of a canvas, 81 centimetres tall. The signature at the lower right gives the year as 84.