Turkey (Johann Wenzel Peter)
Here is a magnificent turkey painted by naturalistic German master Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829) sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Peter was acutely fond of painting images depicting biblical paradise filled with beautiful animals living in harmony (but with ominous thunder clouds blowing in). This magnificent Narragansett Turkey boldly strutting along in a wilderness beneath a lowering sky looks as though he could almost have come from one of the artist’s religious compositions about the world before the Fall. Peter is almost forgotten now (to such an extent that I can find his art online but can not find a biography) yet the work online reveals that he was the greatest turkey painter of the Enlightenment…and perhaps ever.
ferrebeekeeper 
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June 12, 2013 at 7:48 AM
Paul
Short biography: http://www.europeanpaintings.com/paintings/wenzel-peter-johann-attributed-to/
June 18, 2013 at 10:24 PM
Wayne
Thank you so much! How did you even find that, you master sleuth?
June 12, 2013 at 7:51 AM
Paul
Additional info: http://www.galerieheim.fr/oeuvre-details3.php?id_oeuvre=116&lng=2
March 20, 2019 at 3:53 PM
Michael Sumner
Nice painting, but this is a yellow shouldered Ronquieres, not a Narragansett. You show a Narragansett lower down the page and he is clearly very different.