Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud

This is Sisley several years before anyone spoke of Impressionism. He painted the avenue in 1867, when he was still in his twenties and his palette was dark, closer to the Barbizon woods of Diaz and Theodore Rousseau than to the bright light he would later chase. The chestnut trees line a road toward the old royal estate at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, on the edge of Paris, and a startled deer bolts across the near ground, a touch that nods to the realism of Courbet. Large early canvases like this one are scarce. Much of Sisley's work from before 1870 is lost, a good deal of it gone in the ruin of the Franco-Prussian War, which broke his family and left him poor for the rest of his life.