La Croix-Blanche at Saint-Mammès

The house in the title is the château de la Croix-Blanche, a 17th-century manor on the riverbank at Saint-Mammès, where the Loing runs into the Seine. Sisley pushes it out to the right-hand edge. The middle of the canvas goes to a row of thin, spindly trees on the bank and the long blue shadows they lay across the grass down to the water, under a wide grey sky in the early spring light.

He signed and dated it at the lower right, Sisley 84, and sold it that same year to Georges Petit, a Paris dealer with a showy gallery on the rue de Sèze who was then competing with Durand-Ruel for the Impressionists. By the late 1920s the canvas was in Boston, owned by Hannah Marcy Edwards, one of three siblings who left their pictures to the museum in their mother's name.