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Lot Essay
In January 1880, struggling to make ends meet, Sisley moved from the Paris suburbs to the more rural region near the confluence of the Seine and Loing, about seventy-five kilometers southeast of the capital. He immediately made the area his own, tirelessly exploring the converging rivers, gently undulating terrain, and expansive sky until his death in 1899. "Sisley had found his country," the critic Gustave Geffroy later declared (quoted in Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 183).
For almost the whole of his first decade in the region, Sisley lived at Veneux-Nadon and the adjacent hamlet of Les Sablons, on the fringe of the Forest of Fontainebleau. His principal subject during this period was the quays and waterways at nearby Saint-Mammès, a bustling river-port that occupies the right angle formed by the banks of the Seine and the Loing. Sisley had experimented during the later 1870s with the creation of small sequences of paintings, depicting the same subject from different viewpoints and under changing conditions, and this nascent serial procedure became more systematic and pronounced at Veneux-Nadon. He recorded the sweep of the river at Saint-Mammès from every possible angle, shifting his position or simply adjusting his sight line to create a circular panorama--a veritable visual map--of his home country.
To paint the present scene, Sisley set up his easel on the left bank of the Seine, slightly downstream from Saint-Mammès and close to Veneux-Nadon. Looking northeast across the confluence of the Loing, the mouth of which is visible at the right side of the canvas, he painted the houses of Saint-Mammès in the middle distance, and beyond them the road bridge that crosses the Seine. In the lower right, a corner of the grassy riverbank marks the spot where the artist stood, calling attention to his agency in framing the vista, and also serves as a repoussoir device to lead the viewer's eye into depth. The remainder of the scene, in contrast, is relentlessly flattened, the opposing banks of the Seine splayed out on either side of the bridge to produce a horizon line that stretches across the entire canvas. The vast preponderance of the painting, moreover, consists of water and sky, both rendered in vivid shades of turquoise flecked with pale pink and white, as though one reflected the other. This unified plane of blue seems to press toward the picture plane rather than receding into depth, the same illusion that one might experience before the shimmering heat and glare of a high summer's day (almost certainly not evening, the conventional title of the painting notwithstanding).
Although Sisley painted these same riverbanks repeatedly over the course of the 1880s, his technique did not stand still. Compared with his views of Saint-Mammès from earlier in the decade, the blue in the present painting is brighter and more intense, and the facture is more even and systematic. The rippling surface of the water is rendered in overlapping, horizontal dabs; the strokes in the sky are longer and more varied, but still markedly different from the thin, broadly applied layers that the artist customarily favored. These developments may reflect Sisley's awareness of Neo-Impressionism, first presented to the public in Seurat's Un Baignade, Asnières the previous year. Although Sisley is not known to have traveled from Veneux-Nadon between 1883 and 1889, it is possible that he made brief trips to Paris during this period, and he may have discussed Seurat's new and controversial technique with Pissarro, by then a committed advocate of Neo-Impressionism. William Johnston has written about Sisley's work from 1885, the year of the present painting, "The unusually robust technique... confirms the artist's evolving style and increasing strength despite his isolation from colleagues and his financial straits" (exh. cat., op. cit., London, p. 206).
The present painting once belonged to Joseph (or Josef) Stransky, a Czech-born musician who served as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 1911 until 1923, following the brief but fabled tenure of the composer Gustav Mahler. Stransky ultimately abandoned the musical profession for the art world, becoming a partner at E. Gimpel & Wildenstein (later Wildenstein & Company) in New York. He also amassed a private collection that included more than fifty Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.
For almost the whole of his first decade in the region, Sisley lived at Veneux-Nadon and the adjacent hamlet of Les Sablons, on the fringe of the Forest of Fontainebleau. His principal subject during this period was the quays and waterways at nearby Saint-Mammès, a bustling river-port that occupies the right angle formed by the banks of the Seine and the Loing. Sisley had experimented during the later 1870s with the creation of small sequences of paintings, depicting the same subject from different viewpoints and under changing conditions, and this nascent serial procedure became more systematic and pronounced at Veneux-Nadon. He recorded the sweep of the river at Saint-Mammès from every possible angle, shifting his position or simply adjusting his sight line to create a circular panorama--a veritable visual map--of his home country.
To paint the present scene, Sisley set up his easel on the left bank of the Seine, slightly downstream from Saint-Mammès and close to Veneux-Nadon. Looking northeast across the confluence of the Loing, the mouth of which is visible at the right side of the canvas, he painted the houses of Saint-Mammès in the middle distance, and beyond them the road bridge that crosses the Seine. In the lower right, a corner of the grassy riverbank marks the spot where the artist stood, calling attention to his agency in framing the vista, and also serves as a repoussoir device to lead the viewer's eye into depth. The remainder of the scene, in contrast, is relentlessly flattened, the opposing banks of the Seine splayed out on either side of the bridge to produce a horizon line that stretches across the entire canvas. The vast preponderance of the painting, moreover, consists of water and sky, both rendered in vivid shades of turquoise flecked with pale pink and white, as though one reflected the other. This unified plane of blue seems to press toward the picture plane rather than receding into depth, the same illusion that one might experience before the shimmering heat and glare of a high summer's day (almost certainly not evening, the conventional title of the painting notwithstanding).
Although Sisley painted these same riverbanks repeatedly over the course of the 1880s, his technique did not stand still. Compared with his views of Saint-Mammès from earlier in the decade, the blue in the present painting is brighter and more intense, and the facture is more even and systematic. The rippling surface of the water is rendered in overlapping, horizontal dabs; the strokes in the sky are longer and more varied, but still markedly different from the thin, broadly applied layers that the artist customarily favored. These developments may reflect Sisley's awareness of Neo-Impressionism, first presented to the public in Seurat's Un Baignade, Asnières the previous year. Although Sisley is not known to have traveled from Veneux-Nadon between 1883 and 1889, it is possible that he made brief trips to Paris during this period, and he may have discussed Seurat's new and controversial technique with Pissarro, by then a committed advocate of Neo-Impressionism. William Johnston has written about Sisley's work from 1885, the year of the present painting, "The unusually robust technique... confirms the artist's evolving style and increasing strength despite his isolation from colleagues and his financial straits" (exh. cat., op. cit., London, p. 206).
The present painting once belonged to Joseph (or Josef) Stransky, a Czech-born musician who served as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 1911 until 1923, following the brief but fabled tenure of the composer Gustav Mahler. Stransky ultimately abandoned the musical profession for the art world, becoming a partner at E. Gimpel & Wildenstein (later Wildenstein & Company) in New York. He also amassed a private collection that included more than fifty Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.