Casting Crowns: I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day

Claude Monet, *The Magpie,* 1868-69, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Image Source: wikimedia

“In the late 1860s, Monet started to extend the need to capture sensations and render “the effect” to all transitory, even fleeting states of nature. Taking Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley with him, Monet tackled the great challenge of a snow-covered landscape, which Courbet had grandly explored with great success not long before. Toning down Courbet’s lyricism, Monet preferred a frail magpie perched on a gate, like a note on a staff of music, to the world of the forest and hunting.
Sun and shade construct the painting and translate the impalpable part-solid part-liquid matter. The Impressionist landscape was born, five years before the first official exhibition when the movement was given its name.”
READ FULL ESSAY: Musée d’Orsay