THIS week’s picture bids (a hopeful) farewell to winter with a snowscape by the late 19th-century French impressionist Claude Monet.
One of the pioneers of Impressionism, Monet captures a solitary black magpie perched on a gate with the light of the sun casting blue shadows on the freshly fallen snow.
Completed in 1869 when the artist was staying in Normandy with his girlfriend and newborn son, he was able to experiment with the art of painting “en plein air”, which the landscape painter Eugene Boudin had introduced him to in the 1850s.
The pair spent the summer of 1858 painting nature together and both men came to prefer painting outdoors rather than in a studio, using natural light.
The Magpie is one of more than a hundred snowscapes produced by Monet and is his largest winter painting, but its timeless quality and intimate observation has a captivating simplicity for nature lovers often transfixed by the smallest of details.
