The Magpie () is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the French Impressionist Claude Monet, created during the winter of 1868–1869 near the commune of Étretat in Normandy. Monet's patron, Louis Joachim Gaudibert, helped arrange a house in Étretat for Monet's girlfriend Camille Doncieux and their newborn son, allowing Monet to paint in relative comfort, surrounded by his family.
Between 1867 and 1893, Monet and fellow Impressionists Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro painted hundreds of landscapes illustrating the natural effect of snow (effet de neige). Similar winter paintings of lesser quantity were produced by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte, and Paul Gauguin. Art historians believe that a series of severe winters in France contributed to an increase in the number of winter landscapes produced by Impressionists.; ; For the range of 63 major works produced from 1867–1893, see Moffett et al. 1999. This arbitrary time period was established for the first Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige exhibition, based on historical reports of severe winters collected by curators.
The Magpie is one of approximately 140 snowscapes produced by Monet. His first snowscape, A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, was painted sometime in either 1865 or 1867, followed by a notable series of snowscapes in the same year, beginning with The Road in Front of Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter. The Magpie was completed in 1869 and is Monet's largest winter painting. It was followed by The Red Cape (1869–1871), the only known winter painting featuring Camille Doncieux.Moffett et al. 1999, p. 86.
The canvas of The Magpie depicts a solitary black magpie perched on a gate formed in a wattle fence, as the light of the sun shines upon freshly fallen snow creating blue shadows. The painting features one of the first examples of Monet's use of colored shadows, which would later become associated with the Impressionist movement. Monet and the Impressionists used colored shadows to represent the actual, changing conditions of light and shadow as seen in nature, challenging the academic convention of painting shadows black. This subjective theory of color perception was introduced to the art world through the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Michel Eugène Chevreul earlier in the century.
At the time, Monet's innovative use of light and color led to its rejection by the Paris Salon of 1869. Today, art historians classify The Magpie as one of Monet's best snowscape paintings.Arts Council of Great Britain 1957, p. 43: "Perhaps Monet's greatest snow landscape."; : "This, Monet's finest snowscape..."; : "...one of the most magnificent snow scenes in his entire oeuvre..." The painting was privately held until the Musée d'Orsay acquired it in 1984; it is considered one of the most popular paintings in their permanent collection.
Background
In the late 1850s, French landscape painter Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) introduced Monet (1840–1926) to the art of painting en plein air—"in the open air", using natural light. The invention of the collapsible metal paint tube (1841) and portable easel brought painting, formerly confined to studios, into the outdoors. Boudin and Monet spent the summer of 1858 painting nature together. Like Boudin, Monet came to prefer painting outdoors rather than in a studio, the convention of the time. "If I have become a painter," Monet said, "I owe it to Boudin."
The landscape paintings of Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891) influenced both Boudin and Monet and contributed to the development of early Impressionism. After meeting Jongkind in Sainte-Adresse in 1862, Monet began to cultivate an interest in Jongkind's perspective on the changing conditions of the landscape. From Jongkind, Monet learned to substitute optical color for local color.: "...Jongkind discovered how the so-called "local color" changes with the seasons...It suddenly came to him that for the artist appearance, not reality, was the determining factor...the only thing that did matter was the atmospheric condition at a given moment. He shared this revelation with Monet, who, in turn, experimented by making two paintings of a road in Normandy from the same vantage point—the first one under a cloudy sky, and the second when the road was covered with snow." "Complementing the teaching I received from Boudin, Jongkind was from that moment my true master," Monet later reminisced. "It was he who completed the education of my eye". This new way of seeing, a shift from a conceptual to a perceptual approach, formed the basis for Monet's Haystacks (1890–1891), a series of 25 works showing the effects of dynamic atmospheric conditions over time on a single haystack motif.
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) had been painting effets de neige, "snow effects", from as early as 1856,Courbet, Gustave (1856). Trees in the Snow. National Galleries of Scotland. in a landscape style preferred by Japanese, Dutch, and Flemish artists. Influenced by Courbet, Monet painted his first snowscape, A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur (1865 or 1867).Musée d'Orsay : "With this choice of theme, Monet was following in the footsteps of Courbet who had tackled snowscapes in a number of genre scenes. But unlike the older painter, whose principal motif remained the stag and the hunter and who produced many anecdotal scenes, Monet painted an almost deserted landscape, where the cart and its occupant play a very minor role." The painting was originally dated 1865 by Monet. However, correspondence by painter Alexandre Dubourg points to a later date of 1867. In , Eliza Rathbone notes that the date is disputed by scholars. A journalist observed:
We have only seen him once. It was in the winter, during several days of snow, when communications were virtually at a standstill. It was cold enough to split stones. We noticed a foot-warmer, then an easel, then a man, swathed in three coats, his hands in gloves, his face half-frozen. It was M. Monet, studying a snow effect. Published in October 1868, but the anecdote is thought to refer to the previous winter. In A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, Monet avoided the usual hunting genre and motifs used by Courbet. Instead, he focused on light and color in a new way by reducing the number of shades. Monet chose an earth tone color scheme and increased the number of shades of blue to highlight reflections on the snow. Monet followed A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur with a notable series of snowscapes in 1867 including Road by Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter.
First Étretat campaign In 1867, Monet's girlfriend, Camille Doncieux (1847–1879), gave birth to their son Jean in Paris. Lacking money, Monet returned to his father's house in Sainte-Adresse and lived with his aunt, leaving Doncieux and their child in Paris. Monet married Doncieux in 1870. Mme. Louis Joachim Gaudibert, an art collector, became Monet's first patron. Gaudibert helped Monet rent a house in Étretat for Doncieux and Jean in late 1868. Recovering from an episode of depression, Monet joined Doncieux and Jean at the house in Étretat in October, with Doncieux in the role of muse and life model. By December, Monet was in great spirits, "surrounded by everything that I love", and began to focus on painting. In a letter to Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Monet wrote:
I spend my time out in the open, on the shingle beach when the weather is bad or the fishing boats go out, or I go into the countryside which is very beautiful here, that I find perhaps still more charming in winter than in summer and, naturally I work all the time, and I believe that this year I am going to do some serious things.. See also: George, Serge (1996). Claude Monet. Masterworks Series. Ramboro Books. p. 14. .
Although he enjoyed living with Camille and Jean in Étretat, Monet preferred to paint alone in the countryside. He told Bazille:
Don't you think that directly in nature and alone one does better?...I've always been of this mind, and what I do under these conditions has always been better. One is too much taken up with what one sees and hears in Paris, however firm one may be, and what I am painting here has at least the merit of not resembling anyone...because it will be simply the expression of what I shall have felt, I myself, personally.Wildenstein, I, 425-26: letter 44, Dec. 1868 as quoted in Isaacson 1994.
During his time in Étretat, Monet completed three paintings of fishing boats,Includes Fishing Boats, Calm Weather (Bateaux de Pêche, temps calme) (W 123) and Fishing Boats at Sea (W 126). See also Rouart 1958. one of a rural road,Lane in Normandy (W 128). and, sometime between late 1868 and January or February 1869, The Magpie (W 133). See also footnote 14 as cited in Herbert 1996, p. 138. Painted five years before the first major Impressionist exhibition in 1874, The Magpie is one of Monet's 140 winter landscapes,: "Over the course of 30 winters, he [Monet] executed some 140 snowy views"; Moffett et al. 1999, p. 55: "...Monet painted the largest number of winter scenes (more than 140) and is the best known impressionist painter of effets de neige. As Monet took advantage of most significant snowfalls, his output of winter landscapes was often more sporadic, with occasional bursts of activity followed by periods without production..." the largest in its class.Myers 1998: "...his largest winter painting..."; : "It is Monet's largest and most ambitious snowscape, an essay about light and shadow on snow." The exact location of the snow scene depicted in The Magpie is unknown. Ralph T. Coe proposed that Monet painted the scene near the Farm Saint-Siméon above the Seine estuary in Honfleur.
Rejection by the Salon Monet submitted The Magpie and Fishing Boats at Sea (W 126) to the Salon of 1869. Both paintings were rejected in April. Critic Paul Richard said that the jurors rejected the painting as "too common and too coarse". Monet's experimental use of color and radical departure from the descriptive, academic style surprised the public and probably contributed to its dismissal by the jury.Musée d'Orsay, Claude Monet The Magpie, 2006. Monet told French novelist Arsène Houssaye (1815–1896), "This rejection has taken the bread from my mouth, and in spite of my low prices, collectors and dealers turn their backs on me." A century later, The Magpie was acquired by the Musée d'Orsay in 1984. It became one of the most popular paintings in their permanent collection.: "Visitor surveys and sales of postcard and reproductions indicate that it is the most popular single image in the museum"; Also see
Critical analysis In the painting, a black magpie is perched on a gate in a wattle fence as sunlight falls on fresh white snow, creating shadows. With no human figures present, the bird on the gate becomes the focus.Katherine Rothkopf in ; : "In the absence of any human figure, the central feature of the painting is the black bird perched on the gate, which is filled with an almost magical significance". Michael Howard of Manchester Metropolitan University called the painting "an extraordinary evocation of the snow-bound chill of a late winter's afternoon. The blueness of the long shadows creates a delicate contrast with the creamy whites of the sky and landscape".Howard 1989, Monet, p. 33 as quoted in . Curator Lynn Orr, then of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, noted Monet's interest in the changing light that depended on the hour and the vagaries of the atmosphere:: "...qualities of light characteristic of different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions."