Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys

Painted in 1872 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this late autumn landscape by Jean-François Millet shows a flock of turkeys moving through a field—a subject that synthesizes his characteristic concerns with rural labor and the seasonal rhythms of agricultural life. Millet, whose 'The Gleaners' and 'The Angelus' had made him the preeminent painter of French peasant life, treated the autumn landscape with the same gravity he brought to figures of human labor, finding in the season's muted palette and the birds' movement a quiet, melancholic dignity.

Millet renders the autumn landscape in his characteristic warm-to-gray palette—ochre grasses, brown trees, hazy sky—with the flock of turkeys moving across the middle ground as a gently animated dark mass. His brushwork is broad and unhurried, building the landscape through large tonal zones with the figures treated as part of the seasonal scene's organic whole.