Claude Monet’s The Magpie (Paris: Musée d’Orsay), painted in Étretat on the Channel coast near Le Havre in 1869, is universally acknowledged to be his early masterpiece. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge call “the miraculous [Magpie] the prize of the joyful winter at Étretat.” Mary Matthews Gedo states that it is “one of the most magnificent snow scenes in his entire oeuvre.” And Alice Thomine-Berrada concludes that by “choosing a light palette and applying a delicate touch to the colored rendering of shadows . . . Monet created one of the first masterpieces of Impressionism.” But any analysis of Monet’s dazzling technique and subtle colors that ignores the symbolic bird Monet emphasizes in the title can take us only so far. To fully explain the meaning of this miraculous and magnificent masterpiece, we must understand several other elements that contribute to its power: the harsh conditions in which Monet worked, Pieter Bruegel’s painting of a magpie, and the significance of the magpie in folklore, opera, and literature.

Born in Paris in 1840 but taken to Le Havre at the age of five, Monet was as Norman as calvados and camembert and deeply attached to his native place. In the winter of 1868–9, he told his close friend, artistic colleague, and generous patron Frédéric Bazille that he and his family were living in desperate poverty: “for a week we have had no bread, wine, fire to cook on, or light.” But he had an iron physique,