During the last two decades of his life Corot painted many pictures of tidy barnyards and kitchen yards. As here, most of these works show peasant women, children and chickens busy with routine, daily chores. As the American curator Gary Tinterow has written, these paintings, visions 'of timeless rural contentment that emanate from deep within the psyche of the French people … retain their power to evoke a compelling alternative to cramped, urban life'.

Such scenes were a speciality of the Barbizon painters – artists like Jacque, Millet and Hervier – and it was with paintings such as this that Corot was closest to his contemporaries. The young Impressionists are thought to have admired these naturalistic paintings – particularly in the 1860s – though it is not known which of Corot's works they could have seen.