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Lot Essay
In January 1880, struggling to make ends meet, Sisley moved from the Paris suburbs to the more remote and rural region near the confluence of the Seine and the Loing, about seventy-five miles southeast of the capital. In the town of Veneux-Nadon, he found a sizable house, just a few minutes’ walk from both the village center and the rail station, where he would live until fall 1882; a nearby footbridge over the train tracks gave easy access to the left bank of the Seine, and the Forest of Fontainebleau was a short jaunt to the west. “The situation was ideal,” Richard Shone has written, “for the variety of the immediate landscape—farmland and forest, rail, river and canal, cottage gardens on the one hand, overgrown copses on the other, the whole area teeming with chance viewpoints and constantly changing light” (Sisley, London, 1992, p. 128).
During his early years in the region, Sisley frequently painted in the orchards and meadows that lead from Veneux-Nadon down to the Seine, as well as exploring the steep slopes that line that river as it loops northward toward the villages of Thoméry and By. In the present canvas, a quietly luminous springtime view from 1882, he focused his attention on a row of fruit trees that had just come into flower, heralding the new growing season.
Breaking with the methodical unfolding of pictorial space into depth that was a hallmark of academic landscape practice, Sisley painted the trees as a continuous band that extends from one edge of the canvas to the other, making their presence emphatically felt. The cottony white blossoms, described with spirited touches of cream-colored impasto, find a visual echo in the drifting banks of cumulus cloud above. The narrow swath of green in the foreground, where two women gather dried grasses, provides the viewer with a stable vantage point from which to enjoy—as Sisley most clearly did—the immediate pleasures of this bucolic landscape.
During his early years in the region, Sisley frequently painted in the orchards and meadows that lead from Veneux-Nadon down to the Seine, as well as exploring the steep slopes that line that river as it loops northward toward the villages of Thoméry and By. In the present canvas, a quietly luminous springtime view from 1882, he focused his attention on a row of fruit trees that had just come into flower, heralding the new growing season.
Breaking with the methodical unfolding of pictorial space into depth that was a hallmark of academic landscape practice, Sisley painted the trees as a continuous band that extends from one edge of the canvas to the other, making their presence emphatically felt. The cottony white blossoms, described with spirited touches of cream-colored impasto, find a visual echo in the drifting banks of cumulus cloud above. The narrow swath of green in the foreground, where two women gather dried grasses, provides the viewer with a stable vantage point from which to enjoy—as Sisley most clearly did—the immediate pleasures of this bucolic landscape.