La Vieille Église de Moret, le matin au soleil

By the early 1890s Claude Monet was painting Rouen Cathedral over and over, the same façade in shifting light, and the idea of the serial motif was in the air. Sisley, the quietest of the original Impressionists and by then the poorest, took it up in the small town of Moret-sur-Loing, where he had settled for good. His cathedral was humbler: the old parish church of Notre-Dame, a few steps from his door. He painted it around 14 times across 1893 and 1894, always from an upstairs window across the square, following the same west front and the flank of the nave through frost, rain and morning sun. This is the sunlit morning, the grey stone slowly warming. He showed the group together in Paris in 1894. Sisley died in Moret in 1899, still short of the recognition his friends already had, and the church he painted stands there today.