Dead turkey

Dead Turkey from around 1808, in the Prado, is one of the most powerful and singular still-life paintings in Goya's career — a genre he practised rarely but with extraordinary intensity when he chose to engage with it. The dead bird, its head lolling, its feathers dishevelled, its eye glazed, is rendered against a near-black background with a directness that strips the still-life convention of all decorative or symbolic mediation: this is simply a dead animal, observed without sentiment. The 1808 date coincides with the beginning of the Peninsular War, and several of Goya's still-life paintings from this period have been read as metaphors for violent death and the waste of war — though it is also possible that the brutal directness is purely painterly in intention, a response to the tradition of Spanish bodegón painting exemplified by Zurbarán and Sánchez Cotán. Whatever its relationship to the wartime context, the Dead Turkey is among his most technically audacious works, its loaded, expressionistic brushwork anticipating the handling of the Black Paintings.

Goya renders the dead bird with stark, almost aggressive brushwork against a dark background, stripping the still life genre of all decorative pretension. The powerful handling and the unflinching presentation of death anticipate modernist approaches to the genre.