Banks of the Loing near Moret

By 1890, when Sisley painted this, most of the painters he'd started out with were pulling ahead of him. The year before, he had moved for good to Moret-sur-Loing, a small medieval town where the river Loing runs north to meet the Seine about five kilometres away, and he would spend his last decade painting almost nothing else. This is one quiet stretch of that river: boats moored along the bank, the roofs of the town gathered behind a bridge in the distance. The trees stand bare, so it is late autumn or the edge of winter, the light thin and even. He would return to this same water in every season for the rest of his life.