Girl in Field with Turkeys

Girl in Field with Turkeys at the Brooklyn Museum, dated 1885, belongs to the series of paintings depicting young girls herding domestic fowl that Pissarro produced in the mid-1880s at Éragny. Children employed in the task of keeping geese and turkeys from straying were a common sight in nineteenth-century French farming communities, and Pissarro treated this subject with the same dignifying attention he brought to adult agricultural labour. The young turkey-herder is neither picturesque nor pitiable but simply a working child, present in the landscape as a fact of rural life. The Brooklyn Museum's collection of French Impressionism, built through a combination of early acquisitions and systematic twentieth-century collecting, holds this rural figure subject as part of its representation of Pissarro's figure work — less well known than his landscapes but equally central to his artistic programme. The gouache medium, which Pissarro used frequently for these rural figure subjects, allowed for directness and spontaneity compatible with his outdoor working practice.

The girl and turkeys are integrated into the landscape setting through Pissarro's consistent handling of all elements with the same broken-colour technique — figure, birds, and field all described in the same visual language. The composition balances the human figure against the scattered mass of the flock, with the open field providing a luminous horizontal ground. Scale relationships accurately record the modest size of a child among large birds.