La Machine de Marly

What Sisley painted here in 1873 was a piece of working machinery — the pumping station on the Seine at Bougival, west of Paris, that for two centuries had hauled river water uphill to feed the fountains of Versailles. By his day the old apparatus was famous and failing, a Baroque engineering marvel wheezing into the industrial age, and Sisley set it low on the far bank under a wide, changeable sky. He painted it in his loose Impressionist manner just as that circle was forming, and the picture is thought to have hung in the group's first exhibition in 1874. It is now in Copenhagen, at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.