Woman Holding a Dead Cockerel

In April 1788 the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, husband of the painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, put up for sale in Paris the pictures of Charles-Alexandre de Calonne. Calonne had been Louis XVI's controller-general of finances until the year before, when his tax reforms failed and he was dismissed, and he had left for England. This small panel, signed and dated 1650, found no buyer at the sale. Soon afterwards it was bought for the king, probably through Lebrun himself.

A young woman leans out of a stone window holding a dead cockerel by its feet, her other hand on a brass bucket. A birdcage hangs at the right, a pewter jug lies on its side on the sill, and a candle stands in its holder. The Louvre reads the picture as having a double meaning. The Dutch verb vogelen, to go birding, was also slang for sex, and the cock, the cage and the candle were hints a 17th-century buyer would catch at once.

When the Louvre opened as a public museum in August 1793, the king had already been executed, and the panel went on show under a plain title, A Poultry Seller.