Emile Michel, Girl with Turkeys at the Edge of the Wood, Signed and Dated 1872, Oil on Canvas in a Carved Gilt Frame

Two oaks side by side, one still in full summer green, the one beside it already turned to rust and bronze. The whole picture hangs on that difference.

Oil on canvas, unlined, 18 x 25 inches (46 x 64 cm), 36 x 33 inches (91 x 84 cm) framed. Signed E. Michel lower left and dated 72. French, in a carved giltwood frame with an acanthus and berry frieze and shell cartouches at the corners.

A girl in a blue skirt stands in the stubble under the trees with a flock of turkeys around her feet, white and bronze birds scattered across the shorn field, some standing, most settled in the warm grass. The wood runs back in a long diagonal to a low horizon on the left, where the land opens out and a bank of grey weather sits over the distance. Each bird is built with a few loaded strokes and none of them is repeated.

The paint is dry and worked wet into wet in the field, where the stubble is scratched in with the tip of the brush over a warm ground. The foliage carries more body, laid in small dabs that leave the sky showing between the leaves.

The frame has a loss to the composition at the upper left corner, scattered chips along the edges, a break in the beaded fillet and an open joint at a corner. The canvas itself has never been relined and sits on its original keyed stretcher, which is why the surface still carries the drag of the brush in the stubble.