The Magpie

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The Magpie: Claude Monet

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Work Overview: The Magpie
Claude Monet
Alternative name: The Magpie (Monet)
Date: 1869
Style: Impressionism
Genre: landscape
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 89 x 130 cm
Location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

The Magpie (French: La Pie) 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 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.[1]

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 by 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.[2]

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.[3] 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.

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.[12] 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.[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.[15]

During his time in Étretat, Monet completed three paintings of fishing boats,[16] one of a rural road,[17] and, sometime between late 1868 and January or February 1869, The Magpie (W 133).[18] Painted five years before the first major Impressionist exhibition in 1874, The Magpie is one of Monet's 140 winter landscapes,[19] the largest in its class.[20] The exact location of the snow scene depicted in The Magpie is unknown.[21] Ralph T. Coe proposed that Monet painted the scene near the Farm Saint-Siméon above the Seine estuary in Honfleur.

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.[30] 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".[31] 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:[32]

Unusual weather phenomena, such as snow and mist, fascinated Monet because they altered the chromatic appearance of familiar topography. In such paintings as The Magpie, one of Monet's early masterpieces, form dissolves under the combination of a greatly restricted color range, aerial perspective, and broken brushwork. A virtuoso color performance, the painting is an essay on the variations of white perceptible in the reflection of sun on crisp new snow. Wonderfully abstract passages of flat color, such as the strong violet shades along the fence, are divorced from the spatial realities of the objects portrayed.[33]

The Magpie is an early example of Monet's investigation of colored shadows. In this piece, Monet makes use of the complementary colors of blue and yellow. The shadow produced by yellow sunlight shining on the snow gives the impression of a blue-violet color,[34] the effect of simultaneous contrast. French Impressionists popularized the use of colored shadows, which went against the artistic convention of portraying shadows by darkening and desaturating the color. Colored shadows can be directly observed in nature, particularly in the type of snow scene presented by Monet.[35] In his study of Impressionism, art historian John Rewald observed that artists used snowscapes to "investigate the problem of shadows".[36] The problem is summarized by Fred S. Kleiner in Gardner's Art Through the Ages:

After scrutinizing the effects of light and color on forms, the Impressionists concluded that local color—an object's true color in white light— becomes modified by the quality of the light shining on it, by reflections from other objects, and by the effects juxtaposed colors produce. Shadows do not appear gray or black, as many earlier painters thought, but are composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions. Using various colors and short choppy brush strokes, Monet was able to catch accurately the vibrating quality of light.[37]

Monet's use of colored shadows arose from color theories that were popular in the 19th century. German scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) published one of the first modern descriptions of colored shadows in his Theory of Colours (1810). Goethe attempted to challenge the theory of color propounded by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in his treatise on Opticks (1704). Goethe raised questions about subjective and objective color theory and perception, but his intuitive, non-mathematical approach was criticized as unscientific, and his attack on Newton was dismissed as a polemic. The questions Goethe raised about color persisted. Thirty years later, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889) expanded on Goethe's theory with The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839).[12] Goethe and Chevreul's colour theory greatly influenced the art world. It is generally thought that Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro and Monet incorporated elements of these theories into their work.[38] Georges Seurat (1859–1891) came to prominence in 1886 with his technique of chromatic division, a style influenced by the color scheme theories of Chevreul and American physicist Ogden Rood (1831–1902).

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In the late 1860s, Monet started to extend the need to capture sensations and render "the effect" to all transitory, even fleeting states of nature. Taking Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley with him, Monet tackled the great challenge of a snow-covered landscape, which Courbet had grandly explored with great success not long before. Toning down Courbet's lyricism, Monet preferred a frail magpie perched on a gate, like a note on a staff of music, to the world of the forest and hunting.

Sun and shade construct the painting and translate the impalpable part-solid part-liquid matter. The Impressionist landscape was born, five years before the first official exhibition when the movement was given its name.

This painting of a place in the countryside near Etretat, executed on the spot, uses very unusual pale, luminous colours, a fact highlighted by the critic Felix Fénéon: "[The public] accustomed to the tarry sauces cooked up by the chefs of art schools and academies, was flabbergasted by this pale painting."

The novelty and daring of Monet's approach, which was more about perception than description, explain the painting's rejection by the jury of the 1869 salon.

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Claude Monet (1840-1926) created this painting on location near Etretat, Normandy, a seaside town renowned then, and now, for its cliffs. Monet did paint the cliffs (I plan to do another blog comparing various artists rendering of them) but in this painting, he got out into the snowy countryside.

Although born in Paris, Monet’s family moved to the coastal town of Le Havre when Monet was five. He grew up there and eventually met the local landscape artist Eugene Boudin who introduced him to working outside on location. Thus began Monet’s love of working en plein air.

In 1859 he moved to Paris to study art. After a short stint in the military 1861-2 (relieved of duty due to health reasons) he went back to painting. In 1865, the twenty-five year old had two seascapes accepted into the Salon, a big deal for the young artist! He had work accepted the following year as well (his painting of Camille in “Woman in a Green Dress“) but in 1867, his work, “Women in the Garden” was rejected. Even with the earlier Salon success, Monet’s work was not selling and he was in dire straits financially. His father, never approving of Monet’s profession also disapproved vehemently of Monet’s lover Camille Doncieux (from a humble background and much younger than Monet) and refused to help them out. The couple had a son, Jean, in 1867, and Monet became so depressed by their circumstances that he attempted suicide, throwing himself off a bridge into the River Seine. Luckily for us, he was unsuccessful!

At this lowest point, in 1868, Monet attracted his first patron, ship owner Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, who commissioned the artist to paint three life-sized portraits. (You can see one of the amazing portraits here.) Finally, Monet was financially bouyant.

With Gaudibert’s help, Monet rented a house in Etretat where the family went in October 1868. While there, Monet painted many oils of the cliffs and also, unusually, this painting of a snowy landscape called “The Magpie.” Apparently the location where Monet painted this is unknown but perhaps a good guess would be that it was painted close to their rented house since it is likely Monet painted it on site.

So what is it about this painting that makes it so wonderful? For one thing, I remember when I saw it that I felt like the painting was lit from within, it’s that luminous! Even looking at this small image on the screen, I have the sensation of needing to squint my eyes. The low winter sun is outside the picture on the left. It illuminates what I take to be the sea in the background (rather than fields covered in snow), and creates the shadows from the wattle fencing that crosses the painting horizontally.

“The Magpie” is generally a high key painting punctuated by the few darks of visible fence, the gate, a few tree trunks, and the magpie. Take a look at it in black and white. You can see most of the painting looks very light or ‘high-key’.

Monet has captured a landscape heavy with snow, lit by a low winter sun. If you’ve ever experienced a heavy snowfall, you’ll know the muffled silence that comes with it. All is quiet. Nothing moves. Except perhaps for a magpie. Take out that magpie and the painting is still beautiful but the addition of the bird adds life, movement and momentariness (is that a word?) to the painting. Has the magpie just landed? Is it sitting still or moving head side to side? Is it about to fly away? Looking at what appears be the shadow of the bird on the ground, we see it isn’t an accurate shadow of the bird that sits there. This adds to the idea that the bird is in continuous motion and Monet captured two different moments.

You can see that without the magpie, our mind can’t decide which is the focal point – the gate or the dark trees and fence on the right. The addition of that wee magpie makes it very clear where the center of interest is located!

Design-wise, Monet also successfully breaks the painting in half via the top line of the fence cutting horizontally across the picture. He also has the focal point (the magpie) situated to the far left (no rule of thirds here!).

Snow is the dominant subject but what a range of colours Monet uses to depict its whiteness: yellows and reds, violets and blues. The warm colours of the buildings bring relief by contrasting with the coolness of the roof in shade and the blue fence shadows. It is one of the first instances that Monet used colour in the shadows, a way of painting associated with the Impressionist movement. Monet was out in nature and observing the colours he saw. Prior to this, the conventional way of painting shadows was to use black paint. (In comparison, look at Monet’s first snowscape, “A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur,” done only about a year earlier. It’s primarily a black, grey and white painting – little colour to be seen.)

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