Like the ancient Fates, three poultry birds, a man and two women, successively, bleed, pluck and gut poultry, in a great circular movement up and down the canvas.

First it is the farmer at the top right who holds the animal by the neck, the blood flows under the red bleeding. Then the feathers fly with the farmer in the center. Finally, the farmer on the left empties and cleans the animals’ bodies. The offal is stored in a bucket in the foreground on the left. The naked and gutted poultry are piled up on a rough wooden crate, their bare necks hang down and their legs straighten, the only vestiges of their past lives in the farm’s farmyard.

The artist captured the specific hand gestures of each of the characters. They are the actors of the film of the web who recount like mimes the three phases of the final treatment of the poultry. The artist has placed them on the same diagonal that crosses the entire painting. Above this diagonal, the bodies of the three farmers, just sketched, are concentrated with their eyes visibly lowered on their respective tasks. Below, it is the transformation of the bodies of the poultry, which are piled up naked, well offered to our gaze, in full light in the foreground, at the end of the tracking shot. The red verticals on the right revive the dynamics of our circular vision on the canvas.

Three glasses of red wine around a bottle are finally placed on the wooden box vertically from the bleeding machine. The blood of the fowl seems to be transformed into the blood of the vine.

A great diversity of pure colours, worked in depth, compose the materials of the scene with dominant elements: bright red (blood red in the literal sense), on the right; yellow and white on the lower part; green on the left; all with light blues and dark blues in connection, constituting a formidable symphonic and festive pictorial polyphony despite the harshness of the subject.

It was farmers from the village of Villeneuve-le-Comte, the Julien family, who served as models for this painting. Breeders and poultry merchants – before making cheeses – they supplied the artist with farm products when Germaine Lacaze painted in her country studio in Seine-et-Marne. The canvas was made in their farm, which was located just behind the church in Villeneuve-le-Comte, and was then finished in the workshop.

Exhibited at the Salon Populiste in 1957, as well as at a retrospective of the painter’s work in 1974 at the Ateliers d’Art de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, this painting was acquired by Roger Grellet, curator of the Saint-Maur-des-Fossés museum. This painting is currently held by the Intercommunal Museum of Paris Est Marne et Bois.

This painting was the subject of a zoom video in July 2024 with interviews with Bernadette Boustany, chief curator of heritage at the Paris Est Marne et Bois intercommunal museum, Julie Chanut, heritage conservator-restorer specialising in painting and contemporary art and Lydia Harambourg, art historian and critic, corresponding member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

The strength of this work is to captivate our gaze through a succession of animated scenes that suggest several readings:

First, the self-sacrifice and concentration of peasants in their daily work carried out as a family.

Secondly, with the shared wine, we can also imagine the preparation of a large meal where all the products of the farm are sacrificed together, constituting the first stage of a great family celebration to come.

Then, more unconsciously, we can see a portrait of artistic creation, which lays bare the heart and all the guts of the artist, before our eyes as art consumers.

Finally, more allegorically, a portrait of the violence of life that can paradoxically be the source of joys in a mysterious eternal cycle that human beings taste, suffer or feed without knowing with their eyes closed …

It is up to the viewer to dream, it is the poetic force of Germaine Lacaze’s works, even when they are inspired by rustic subjects, favoured at the time by painters who were witnesses of their time, including Germaine Lacaze.