The Magpie

The Magpie is an exquisite winter landscape painted by Claude Monet during the winter of 1868–1869 near Étretat, a coastal town in Normandy, France. Monet’s patron, Louis Joachim Gaudibert, arranged a house in Étretat for Monet’s partner Camille Doncieux and their newborn son, which allowed Monet to paint in relative comfort, surrounded by his family. This painting is part of a larger body of work by Monet and fellow Impressionists Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, who between 1867 and 1893 produced hundreds of landscapes exploring the natural effects of snow, known as effet de neige.

Monet was influenced by earlier snowscapes painted by Gustave Courbet and the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, from whom Monet learned to substitute optical color for local color, shifting from a conceptual to a perceptual approach to painting nature. This led Monet to focus on how light and color change the appearance of familiar landscapes over time, a theme that runs through much of his work.

The Magpie centers on a solitary black magpie perched on a gate in a wattle fence, bathed in bright sunlight that casts long blue shadows on the snow-covered ground. This interplay of light and shadow is a hallmark of the painting and an early example of Monet’s groundbreaking use of colored shadows—rejecting the traditional depiction of shadows as simply dark or black. Instead, Monet shows shadows as rich in color, particularly blues and violets, which enhance the vibrant atmosphere and realistic feeling of cold winter light.

At the time, Monet submitted The Magpie to the Paris Salon in 1869, but it was rejected as “too common and too coarse,” due in part to Monet’s innovative use of color and departure from academic norms. Despite this initial rejection, The Magpie is now celebrated as one of Monet’s finest snowscapes and a key work in the development of Impressionism.

Monet’s keen observation of light’s effect on snow and the landscape makes The Magpie not only a beautiful scene but also a study in the science of color perception. His use of complementary colors, influenced by 19th-century theories of Goethe and Chevreul, allowed Monet to capture the vibrancy and complexity of natural light.

Today, The Magpie is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and remains one of the museum’s most popular and admired works, exemplifying Monet’s innovative spirit and his mastery of depicting the transient effects of light and atmosphere in nature.