Fog, Voisins

Sisley was living at Voisins, a hamlet beside Louveciennes west of Paris, and in 1874 he painted a morning when the fog had taken almost everything out of the view. A fence shows faintly at the back, foliage fills the left, and a tree with twisted branches stands on the right with a woman crouched beneath it, apparently picking flowers. The rest goes to a silvery blue-grey. He signed it at the bottom, Sisley 74.

The canvas reached the French state in 1937 from Antonin Personnaz, a collector from Bayonne who had bought the Impressionists early and was a friend of Pissarro and of Guillaumin in particular. Personnaz also worked at the autochrome, the colour photography the Lumiere brothers put on sale in 1907, and made more than a thousand plates himself. His bequest ran to around 140 pictures, shared between the museum in his own town and the national collection in Paris.