How Millet's Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys Fits into His Overall Schema

Focusing specifically on Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, one can easily understand how Millet's humanitarian fatalism is born out in his work, depicting the way that the peasantry suffers through natural elements.

To go into detail about the above annotations, it is important to explain the environment of the peasant woman and how it is built through realistic design elements. The sky, as noted, is darkened around the edges but light in the middle. This creates a feeling of a looming winter. To the peasant, the winter represents hardships as a result of the environment, as it grows more difficult to find food or even survive the cold.

Similarly, the tree at the center of the painting has lost its leaves. This is a means by which Millet conveys how the state of the environment affects all of the things living within it. The tree suffers and its leaves die as a result of the changing seasons, just as the peasant will with the looming winter.

The tower at the center of the image is interesting as well. It is a real tower in Chailly-en-Biere that served as an open-air furnace. This means that, in the scene of the looming winter, Millet has placed a broken symbol of heat. The peasant looks on to the tower, showing that she is unable to rely on anything to provide heat in the face of the coming winter. In a similar way, the way the peasant woman is depicted on the same horizontal plane as turkeys further conveys the idea that she is doomed to suffer due to the environment. Millet held a view of the peasantry that equivocated it with animals insofar as they are unable to rise above their station and evade their environment. This furthers the notion that peasants are doomed to face the environment and suffer as a result.

References

Miller, Asher Ethan. “Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys.” MetMuseum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437094.