The Magpie

A single black bird on a gate, and all around it a field of snow that is not white at all but cream, gold and blue. Monet painted The Magpie in the winter of 1868-1869, and the Salon turned it away.

The story behind the painting

In late 1868 Claude Monet was recovering from a period of depression. His first patron, Louis Joachim Gaudibert, helped rent a house in Étretat, in Normandy, for Camille Doncieux and their infant son Jean, and Monet joined them there in October. By December he wrote that he was "surrounded by everything that I love" and working all the time. Yet he preferred to paint alone, out in the countryside, believing that what he made there would be simply the expression of what he himself had felt. Sometime between late 1868 and early 1869 he painted The Magpie. The exact spot is unknown; Ralph T. Coe proposed it was near the Saint-Siméon farm above the Seine estuary at Honfleur. It is the largest of the roughly 140 snow scenes Monet produced.

What to look for

Begin with the bird. A solitary black magpie perches on a gate set into a woven wattle fence, and because there are no people in the picture, that small dark shape becomes the anchor for everything else. Now let your eye travel across the snow. Sunlight falls on a fresh layer of it, and the fence and gate throw long shadows across the ground. Those shadows are not grey or black; they are blue. Michael Howard described the delicate contrast between the blueness of these long shadows and the creamy whites of sky and landscape, an evocation of the chill of a late winter afternoon. Curator Lynn Orr noted how form dissolves here through a restricted range of colour, aerial perspective and broken brushwork, with passages of flat colour that verge on the abstract.

Meaning and intent

Orr called the painting an essay on the variations of white that can be seen when sun strikes crisp new snow. That is the heart of it: Monet was painting not simply a scene but the way light changes what we see. The Magpie contains one of the first examples of his coloured shadows, a practice later tied to Impressionism. Academic convention painted shadows dark; Monet and his circle tried instead to record the actual, shifting conditions of light in nature, an idea of colour perception that had entered the art world earlier in the century through Goethe and Chevreul. The lone magpie, small against so much brightness, gives that study of light a living, almost quiet presence.

Legacy

Monet sent The Magpie to the Salon of 1869, and in April it was rejected. Critic Paul Richard reported that the jurors found it "too common and too coarse", and its experimental colour likely surprised them. Monet told the novelist Arsène Houssaye that the rejection had taken the bread from his mouth. The verdict of history has been kinder. Art historians now count The Magpie among Monet's best snowscapes. It stayed in private hands until the Musée d'Orsay in Paris acquired it in 1984, and it has since become one of the most popular paintings in the museum's permanent collection.