Les voleurs de poulet

Les voleurs de poulet (The Chicken Thieves), painted in 1927 and held in the Musée de l'Hôtel-Dieu, is an unusual subject in Luce's late career — a narrative rural genre scene depicting an act of minor rural transgression. At age sixty-seven, living in Rolleboise, Luce was painting the life of the Seine valley countryside with a warmth and directness that his earlier career's political urgency had sometimes obscured. The chicken thief subject — a popular motif in folk painting and print culture — carries a trace of Luce's old anarchist sympathy with those who take from those who have, rendered here without moral judgment but with evident human warmth. Rural genre painting with narrative elements had a long history from Dutch seventeenth-century works through Millet's peasant scenes, and Luce's version brings his characteristic directness and refusal of sentimentality to what could easily become a quaint or picturesque subject. The late date and light subject matter suggest a painter enjoying the pleasures of his adopted rural home.

The narrative subject is handled with the loose, confident brushwork of Luce's late style — economical strokes that establish figure positions and their relationship to the rural environment without laboring compositional details. The rural light of the Rolleboise area provides a warm ambient illumination.