Louveciennes. Sentier de la Mi-côte

Sisley painted this village lane at Louveciennes, west of Paris, in 1873, the year before he and his friends first hung their work together as a group, in the show a critic would mock with the word Impressionists. Only a few years earlier these same villages had lain in the path of the Prussian advance on Paris. Here the war has gone quiet again. A path climbs the hillside between garden walls under a wide, changeable sky, and a single figure stands at a railing partway up. Sisley kept returning to these ordinary roads around Louveciennes, painting the same slopes in different weather.