Monet's The Magpie (1868-69): The Snow Painting With Blue Shadows

6 days ago

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Updated: 4 days ago

Claude Monet's The Magpie (La Pie) is an oil painting of a snow-covered Normandy farmyard, made in the winter of 1868-69 at Étretat. Its shadows are blue and lilac instead of grey, a colour decision that was years ahead of Impressionism and helped get the picture rejected by the Salon.

Claude Monet, The Magpie (La Pie), 1868-69 — Claude Monet, The Magpie (La Pie), c.1868-69. Oil on canvas, about 89 x 130 cm. Held in a Paris collection.

The facts at a glance

Artist: Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Dates: painted in the winter of 1868-69
Technique: oil on canvas, about 89 x 130 cm
Place: a farm gate near Étretat, on the Normandy coast
Today: a Paris collection, acquired for the French national museums in 1984

Why are the shadows in The Magpie blue?

Because that is what snow shadows look like on a bright day, and Monet was willing to paint what he saw rather than what the studio taught. Academic painters shaded snow with grey or brown. Monet read the shadows of the fence, the roof and the trees as cool blue, lilac and even faint violet, set against warm yellow-white where the sun hits the drifts.

The effect is easy to test. Look at the long shadow thrown across the foreground: it is not a dark patch but a field of colour, brushed in with soft, broad strokes. The same idea runs through his later work, from the haystacks to the Rouen Cathedral series, where shadows are never simply dark.

What is happening at the gate?

Almost nothing, and that is the point. A single magpie sits on the top bar of a wicker gate in the middle of the picture. Behind it stretch a low hedge, a thatched farmhouse and a few bare trees under a pale, cold sky. The bird is the one dark, sharp note in a scene of soft white, so the eye goes straight to it and then wanders slowly out across the snow.

Magpies in French folklore are chatterers and thieves, and some readers see a wink in the title. Monet left no explanation. What is documented is the care of the composition: the gate and bird are placed just off centre, and the fence lines guide you back to them.

Painted outdoors in a hard winter

Monet spent the winter of 1868-69 at Étretat with Camille Doncieux and their infant son Jean, supported by the Le Havre collector Louis-Joachim Gaudibert. He was short of money, and stories survive of him working in the cold on the spot, returning to the same view under changing light. Painting a large canvas this way, in snow, was unusual in 1869. It points straight toward the open-air methods he and his friends would use at Argenteuil a few years later.

Prefer to see the whole story of that movement? Start with Impression, Sunrise (1872).

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Why did the Salon reject it?

The jury of 1869 turned the painting down. Its flat, decorative handling and the lack of any story or classical frame went against the Salon's taste, and its colour looked unfinished to judges used to brown shadows. Today it is treated as one of the key snow pictures of the nineteenth century.

Why it works as winter wall art

The Magpie suits a quiet room. The palette is narrow, mostly white, soft blue and warm grey, so it does not fight with furniture or other pictures, and the horizontal format fits above a sofa, a bed or a console table. It brings daylight into a dark winter wall rather than another warm, heavy scene.

For another side of his colour, read Monet's Water Lilies: The Twenty-Five-Year Project.

Zocine Art Design is an independent studio that prints classic paintings as wall art.

Frequently asked questions

When did Monet paint The Magpie?

Monet painted The Magpie in the winter of 1868-69 at Étretat, on the Normandy coast.

Why are the shadows blue in The Magpie?

Monet painted the shadows as he saw them in bright light, in cool blue and lilac against warm sunlit snow, instead of using grey or brown as academic painters did.