BESSY-SUR-CURE, LA PROVENDE DES POULES

BESSY-SUR-CURE, LA PROVENDE DES POULES (Bessy-sur-Cure, Feeding the Chickens), painted in 1907, depicts a rural farmyard subject in the Burgundian village of Bessy-sur-Cure, situated on the Cure river in the Yonne department. Luce spent time regularly in this part of Burgundy from the late 1890s onward, and his Burgundian rural paintings offer a counterpoint to his urban and industrial works — quieter, more domestically scaled subjects from agricultural life. Feeding chickens was a daily farmyard ritual whose imagery appears across the whole tradition of rural genre painting from seventeenth-century Dutch painting through Millet and Pissarro. Luce's treatment of this everyday agricultural activity reflects his consistent interest in depicting ordinary labor — here specifically the domestic labor of the rural household — with the same seriousness he brought to Parisian street workers and Belgian miners. The 1907 date places this within a prolific period of rural landscape work alongside his Dutch trip paintings.

The farmyard scene is rendered with warm, light-saturated brushwork that describes the particular quality of Burgundian rural light — less intense than the Mediterranean but rich and golden in summer. Animal subjects and rural figures are treated with the same directness Luce applies to human workers in urban contexts.