In Winter, Snow Effect

Sisley spent two winters at Marly-le-Roi, between 1875 and 1877, in a village that had once been a royal address. Louis XIV built his retreat here, and the château was pulled down soon after the Revolution, so by the 1870s Marly kept the famous name and little else, a park, a horse pond, and streets of ordinary houses. He painted this snow scene on the heights above that village in 1876. The museum in Lille, which has owned it since 1974, describes what he was working with, a barely tinted palette rich in pinkish and bluish greys, and points out the coach coming down the snowed street and the figures who have stopped in it to talk. He signed and dated the lower left corner, Sisley 76.