The Magpie by Claude Monet Poster

The Magpie (French: La Pie) is winter landscape painting by the French Impressionist Claude Monet, created during the winter of 1868–1869 near the commune of Étretat in Normandy. The painting is one of Monet's early masterpieces, features a combination of a greatly restricted colour range, aerial perspective, and broken brushwork. A virtuoso colour 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 colour, such as the strong violet shades along the fence, are divorced from the spatial realities of the objects portrayed. 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.