The Magpie

Claude Monet

Oil on canvas

Musée d'Orsay

The Magpie (French: La Pie) is an oil-on-canvas winter landscape depicting a solitary black magpie perched on a wattle gate amid a broad, snow-covered countryside near Étretat in Normandy. Monet suffuses the scene with pale, luminous color, rendering the shadows in soft blues and lavenders rather than conventional black—one of the earliest documented instances of his use of colored shadows, a technique that would become a hallmark of Impressionism. Painted en plein air during the winter of 1868–1869, the work predates the first official Impressionist exhibition by five years and reflects Monet's commitment to capturing transitory effects of natural light over academic description. Rejected by the Paris Salon of 1869 as too common and too coarse, the painting is today regarded by art historians as one of Monet's finest snowscapes and one of the most celebrated works in the Musée d'Orsay's permanent collection.