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Claude Monet, 'The Magpie', 1868-9

 


My eye is not immediately drawn to anything. The image is so familiar, over familiar, that I look without really seeing. It is almost impossible to see this as 'radical' and yet when it was painted the term Impressionism had not been invented and this apparently harmless landscape was rejected by the French salon. The magpie on the gate is clearly the focus: it is the title of the painting, the only sign of warmth and life in this chilly landscape, but my eye still prefers to dart across the whole canvas than linger on the dark silhouette of the bird. Perhaps Monet simply needed a subject, an excuse to paint the light and weather conditions he was really interested in. Yet the choice of this bird seems deliberate. Magpies carry so much symbolism that it seems unlikely he just happened across it sitting on a gate, and the footprints which lead the viewer into the canvas also lead one to climb the 'ladder' of the gate's shadow and then the bars of the gate itself. The black profile of the bird's head looks towards the house in the trees. Is it symbolising death within or merely the dead of winter without? And magpies are also considered cunning and devious. Monet is being deceptively clever in creating a painting which looks so innocuous, simply a snowy scene and yet which becomes more complex the longer one looks. 

There are three distinct divisions of distance. The ambiguous slope of the foreground which seems to tilt forwards out of the picture space and which is abruptly shut off by the gate and woven fence. Behind that the middle ground is busy - the twisting curves of the snow-laden branches - the background stretching out bleakly beyond until, fading with atmospheric perspective, it merges seamlessly with the sky. Yet all the distance is an illusion. The more one looks, the more the flatness of the canvas becomes apparent, just as the linear qualities which seem to dominate - the timbers of the fence and gate, the branches of the trees - start to dissolve into brushstrokes and the 'white' becomes colour. The deep shadow of the fence is almost blue in comparison with the creamy foreground, lit by weak, but welcome winter sunlight and the trees seem to sway with pinky lavenders. That is what Monet was interested in and that is what drove him to paint outside on a freezing day. But that is not what lingers in the mind and it is not why this has been used on a thousand Christmas cards. This is a painting of winter, so coldly evocative that you can almost see your breath as you stare at it. One of those rare snowy days when everything falls silent except for the occasional crack of a branch under the weight of its white blanket. When you want to go out into the cold and and enjoy the silence and the cold and the beauty.

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