The Magpie

What you are looking at

Fresh snow covers everything: a sloping field, a wattle fence, a hedge, the roof of a long farmhouse, the branches of the trees beyond. The sun is low and behind the trees at right, and its light comes toward us, so the shadows of the fence posts and trees stretch across the snow in long bands of blue and lilac. At the left, the fence runs back along the field, and set into it is a rough wooden gate of four rails.

On its top rail sits one small black bird, a magpie. It is the only truly dark spot in a huge expanse of white, and once you see it, the whole picture turns around it. Beyond the gate, the land falls away into a pale, misty distance where the trees dissolve into the sky. Monet signed the canvas at lower right.

Claude Monet painted La Pie in the winter of 1868–69 near Étretat on the Normandy coast. The canvas is large for a landscape, 89 by 130 centimeters, is number 133 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Where and when

That winter Monet, Camille and their baby son Jean were living at Étretat, helped by the Le Havre patron Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, and Monet wrote to Bazille that he spent his days outdoors, on the shingle or in the countryside. The farm landscape here lies inland from the cliffs, in the countryside around the town. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

Monet painted outdoors in the cold. A journalist who came upon him at work in the snow near Honfleur a year or two earlier described him wrapped in several coats, gloved, with a foot warmer under him, at his easel in front of the motif in the freezing cold. The Magpie was the fruit of that kind of persistence: one of about 140 snow scenes Monet painted over his career, and the most famous.

How it was painted

The key discovery is in the shadows. Traditional painters made shadows on snow grey or brown. Monet saw that they are blue, because they reflect the sky, and he painted them blue and violet, while the sunlit snow is warmed with touches of cream, yellow and pink. The result looks, at first, simply white, and turns out to contain almost every color.

Look at the gate. Its posts and rails are a few strokes of dark brown, and their shadows on the snow are thin violet lines that fan out toward us. Then look at the hedge and stone wall to the right, where snow sits heavily on the branches, painted with thick, creamy paint, and at the farmhouse roof, a flat plane of blue-white under a line of snow-laden trees. In the distance the trees dissolve into a pale haze against a sky of yellow-grey.

The magpie is barely a few strokes of black, but Monet places it at the junction of the gate and the fence, exactly where the eye goes first, and its darkness makes all the whites around it brighter.

Reception and siblings

Monet submitted The Magpie to the Salon of 1869. It was rejected; the jury found its colored shadows and broad handling strange and unfinished. It stayed in private hands for more than a century, and the Musée d'Orsay acquired it in 1984. Today it is among the most loved paintings in the museum.

Monet had tried the snow scene a couple of winters earlier in A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur and The Road in front of Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter. The interior he painted that same winter is The Lunch. Later snow pictures include The Boulevard de Pontoise under Snow of 1875. A close-up of the bird is at The Magpie (detail).

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Musée d'Orsay: see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay. For the artist, see Claude Monet.