Girl in Field with Turkeys (La Dindonnière)

Camille Pissarro produced many fan designs in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Japanese and Japanese-inspired arts were very popular in Europe. Fan designs were fine art collectibles, available at lower prices than oil paintings. They were a reliable if tedious source of income, as described by Pissarro in an 1885 letter: “I’ve got to slog away at some fans, since times are hard and for the moment, they’re the only things that can find takers.”

For his fan designs, a form identified with luxury commodities, Pissarro often chose rural subjects such as the scene depicted here—images of lives in contrast with those of the fashionable urban women who used actual fans or hung decorative ones in their homes.