Le long du bois en automne

In 1885 Sisley lived in Les Sablons, a small village not far from the town of Moret-sur-Loing, where he would settle permanently in 1889. The artist was enamored of the area and frequently portrayed the foot paths through woods and thickets, and country lanes which surrounded his home. Nevertheless, however absorbed he was by the natural landscape, he rarely overlooked the presence of people casually going about their daily lives. "In many of the paintings made at Les Sablons, the note is one of withdrawn simplicity, meditative and undramatic. This is country life, neither bucolic nor picturesque...in which the only 'events' are a turn in the road or a fallen tree, a local woman on a path..." (R. Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, p. 142).

In contrast to an artist like Monet, for whom the pure and untrammeled state of nature held far greater mystery and attraction, Sisley endeavored to depict an easy and untroubled balance between rural life and nature. Gustave Geffroy wrote:

He sought to express the harmonies that prevail, in all weather and at every time of day, between foliage, water and sky; and he succeeded... He loved river banks; the fringes of woodlands; towns and villages glimpsed through the trees; old buildings swamped in greenery; winter morning sunlight; summer afternoons. He had a delicate way of conveying the effects of foliage (in "Sisley," Les Cahiers d'Aujourd'hui, Paris, 1923).