Bateaux à l'écluse de Bougival

The Seine at Bougival is remembered for its Sunday boating. La Grenouillere, the floating cafe and bathing place where Monet and Renoir set up their easels side by side in 1869, was moored just across the water off Croissy. Sisley's subject here, four years later, is the working river. A dam and a lock had gone in at Bougival around 1840, part of the long business of canalising the Seine below Paris so that barges could get through, and what he painted in 1873 is the boats at that lock.

He was living at Louveciennes on the hill above, and the river gave him most of his motifs in those years. In 1906, seven years after his death, the collector Etienne Moreau-Nelaton bought this canvas out of a Rouen collection and gave it to the French state along with the rest of his pictures.