Bridge at Hampton Court

Sisley spent about four months in England in the summer of 1874, at Hampton Court on the Thames, on a trip paid for by Jean-Baptiste Faure, a baritone at the Paris Opera who collected Impressionist pictures and ended up owning close to 60 Sisleys. He came home with around 16 canvases of the same short stretch of river. The bridge he kept returning to was nine years old and privately owned, a wrought-iron lattice on cast-iron columns put up in 1865, and you paid a toll to cross it. Local opinion of it was poor. One writer of the period called it one of the ugliest bridges in England. Two years after Sisley painted it a joint committee bought the bridge and the tolls ended, and the ironwork itself came down in the early 1930s, when the bridge that stands there now was finished.