Le Repos au bord d'un ruisseau. Lisière de bois

1878 was a lean year for Alfred Sisley. English by parents but French by life, he had lost the family money in the crash of the early 1870s and was living outside Paris on very little, while the Impressionist circle he belonged to was already fraying into arguments and separate shows. None of that strain shows here. A figure in blue rests at the edge of a wood where a stream slips past, and Sisley gives the whole thing over to weather and light, feathery strokes for the leaves, broken touches for the water's shimmer. He almost never painted people large or any event at all. He spent his life on skies, rivers, and the ordinary countryside near Paris, and died in 1899 still poor, just before his pictures began to sell.