Chicken Coop

Fortuny painted this farmyard scene during the final years of his brief life, when he retreated from the grand orientalist spectacles that had made him famous and turned instead to intimate studies of light falling on humble subjects. Working in Rome and later Granada, he developed an increasingly free handling of paint that anticipated Impressionist concerns well before Monet's movement coalesced in Paris. The chicken coop as subject matter reflects a deliberate anti-academic impulse — Fortuny was consciously rejecting the history painting expected of a Prix de Rome laureate and finding pictorial richness in the mundane. The painting belongs to a group of small-scale cabinet works Fortuny produced with remarkable speed and spontaneity, using loaded brushwork and broken color that stunned collectors who paid high prices for his slick orientalist set pieces. His technical freedom in these late works went largely unnoticed until twentieth-century critics reassessed them as the most genuinely modern things he made.

Loose, gestural brushwork defines the straw and feathers without laboring surface detail. Fortuny exploits the warm ground tone, leaving it exposed in shadow areas to unify the composition. Flicks of impasto catch light on the birds' plumage with an economy that rewards close inspection.