Focus on The Magpie (Monet) and explain the Background.
In the late 1850s, French landscape painter Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) introduced Monet (1840–1926) to the art of painting en plein air—"in the open air", using natural light. The invention of the collapsible metal paint tube (1841) and portable easel brought painting, formerly confined to studios, into the outdoors. Boudin and Monet spent the summer of 1858 painting nature together. Like Boudin, Monet came to prefer painting outdoors rather than in a studio, the convention of the time. "If I have become a painter," Monet said, "I owe it to Boudin."
The landscape paintings of Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891) influenced both Boudin and Monet and contributed to the development of early Impressionism. After meeting Jongkind in Sainte-Adresse in 1862, Monet began to cultivate an interest in Jongkind's perspective on the changing conditions of the landscape. From Jongkind, Monet learned to substitute optical color for local color. "Complementing the teaching I received from Boudin, Jongkind was from that moment my true master," Monet later reminisced. "It was he who completed the education of my eye". This new way of seeing, a shift from a conceptual to a perceptual approach, formed the basis for Monet's Haystacks (1890-1891), a series of 25 works showing the effects of dynamic atmospheric conditions over time on a single haystack motif.
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) had been painting effets de neige, "snow effects", from as early as 1856, in a landscape style preferred by Japanese, Dutch, and Flemish artists. Influenced by Courbet, Monet painted his first snowscape, A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur (1865 or 1867). A journalist observed:We have only seen him once. It was in the winter, during several days of snow, when communications were virtually at a standstill. It was cold enough to split stones. We noticed a foot-warmer, then an easel, then a man, swathed in three coats, his hands in gloves, his face half-frozen. It was M. Monet, studying a snow effect. 
In A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, Monet avoided the usual hunting genre and motifs used by Courbet. Instead, he focused on light and color in a new way by reducing the number of shades. Monet chose an earth tone color scheme and increased the number of shades of blue to highlight reflections on the snow.  Monet followed A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur with a notable series of snowscapes in 1867 including Road by Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter.
Gustave Courbet metal paint tube A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur Impressionism W haystack Haystacks Sainte-Adresse Honfleur Eugène Boudin earth tone en plein air Hay motif local color portable easel easel studio Road by Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter Johan Barthold Jongkind