The Magpie — The story behind it

How it came about

A single black bird sits on a wattle fence in a snowbound Normandy landscape, and the whole picture is really about how snow is not white. Monet paints the shadows blue and lilac, which was unusual enough in 1868 that the jury of the Salon rejected it.

Where it fits in the series

Coast & Sea occupied Monet across several years, and The Magpie belongs to the middle of that work rather than its beginning or its end. The early pictures in the group establish the motif; the late ones push it toward abstraction until the subject is barely holding the surface together.

Seen in sequence, The Magpie is a picture in which the subject is still legible and the handling is already free. That combination is why this period of Monet's work is the most widely reproduced — it satisfies both the viewer who wants a recognisable scene and the viewer who wants paint.

The market story, briefly

Monet's market has been one of the most consistent in modern art. Works from the Coast & Sea group rarely come to auction, and when they do the prices are recorded in tens of millions — a level that has more to do with scarcity and provenance than with any change in how the pictures are regarded.

That is worth knowing for one reason: the price of a reproduction has nothing to do with the price of the original. A print is priced for what it is — ink, canvas, labour and shipping.

Provenance of the original

Rejected by the Salon of 1869; bought by Arsène Houssaye, then in the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg before transfer to the Orsay.

Reading the date

1868 is the year usually given for The Magpie, but Monet's working method makes single dates misleading. He kept canvases in the studio for months or years, reworking them when the season came round again, and he dated pictures by when they were begun as often as by when they were finished.

This matters when you compare the Coast & Sea pictures against each other. Two works dated to the same year can belong to visibly different stages of the series, because one was resolved in the field and the other was rebuilt in the studio afterwards.

The original of The Magpie is in the collection of Musée d'Orsay, Paris. We are not affiliated with the museum, and no museum endorsement is implied.