La Dinde plumée

Goya painted this dead bird during the worst years of the Peninsular War, when French and Spanish armies fought back and forth across the country and famine emptied Madrid. It belongs to a group of about a dozen still lifes he kept for himself, listed among his possessions in an inventory of 1812. There is no feast here and no ornament, just a plucked turkey laid out on a bare surface and painted with the same unflinching attention Goya was giving, in those same years, to the etchings he was making of the war's dead. He never sold these still lifes. They stayed in his studio, and this one eventually made its way to a museum in Munich.