LoginReading visual art: 181 Magpie
The magpie in its various species is common throughout much of the world, and in Europe has become associated with various folk tales and behaviours. A member of the family Corvidae (crows), it’s smart and capable of near-human skills such as working in teams and playing games. There are long-held associations with both good and evil, and an old English nursery rhyme starting “One for sorrow, two for joy” to express that ambivalence. They also have a justified reputation for collecting shiny objects, another of their human behaviours.
Although an everyday species, magpies are surprisingly popular in paintings, albeit in cameo appearances rather than as stars. One association in classical myth is with the nine daughters of King Pierus, the Pierides, who were turned into birds after being defeated by the Muses in a contest of song. While they’re often said to have become magpies, that’s now considered erroneous, and they were actually turned into jays.
Hendrick van Balen’s Minerva and the Nine Muses (c 1610) shows all the key figures involved. The nine Muses are seated, forming a small orchestra with their contemporary rather than classical instruments. Minerva, at the left, is being engaged by a tenth woman, whose identity isn’t clear. In the far distance, just beyond a waterfall, Pegasus is about to take off from a high cliff. Above there are two magpies, implying the imminent arrival of the Pierides.
From the early Northern Renaissance onwards, magpies feature in several prominent European paintings.
Out in the garden, midway between their knees, in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin from about 1435, there are two magpies, presumably here signifying joy. They’re shown in the detail below.
Another appears on the exterior tondo of Hieronymus Bosch’s Wayfarer triptych from 1500-10. This shows the figure of a travelling man in the foreground, against a countryside background with a single tumbledown building. To the right is a small field gate and a tree, behind which is a single magpie on the ground, and a cow. This could be ‘one for sorrow’ given in the rhyme.
In Jacopo Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders from about 1555, immediately above her head is a magpie, presumably for its association with mischief and theft. This is clearer in the detail below.
The associations in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Magpie on the Gallows (1568) are darker still.
It has been suggested that this painting may allude to popular proverbs, such as ‘dancing on the gallows’ meaning mocking the state, or the folk role of the magpie as a gossip (and Ovid’s story of the Pierides), and gossip as being life-endangering in times of political tension. The magpie is shown in the detail below.
Magpies are capable of speaking, although not as well as parrots. I’m unsure whether that’s Alessandro Magnasco’s reference in his unusual painting of The Tame Magpie (Teaching the Magpie to Sing) from about 1707. Against a backdrop of ruins, a motley assortment of misfits and the poor are seen watching the young man in the centre trying to teach the tame magpie on the barrels to sing.
Around 1870, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro painted many snow scenes. One of Monet’s best-known is paradoxically The Magpie (1868-9), where the bird is probably the smallest and least conspicuous part of the whole motif.
A magpie also makes a cameo appearance in Luc-Olivier Merson’s marvellous painting of The Wolf of Agubbio from 1877. Set in the town’s central piazza, it’s a cold winter’s day, so cold that the waters of its grand fountain are frozen as they cascade over its stonework. As the townspeople go about their business, there’s the large wolf of its title with a prominent halo, standing at the door of the butcher’s shop. Leaning out from that door, the butcher is handing a piece of meat to the wolf. In the details are a menagerie of creatures, including a magpie in the entrance to the butcher’s, as seen in the detail below.
