Matin de février à Moret-sur-Loing

Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had backed the Impressionists and then run out of money to keep doing it, began buying from them again in 1881. That mattered to Sisley, who had moved his family the year before to Veneux-Nadon, a hamlet near Fontainebleau within walking distance of Moret-sur-Loing, and was working along the Loing almost daily. This is a February morning on the river there, the trees bare, the town on the far bank. The catalogue of his work records the canvas going to Durand-Ruel on 3 March 1881, a few weeks after the morning it shows. Renoir arranged a one-man show for him the same year, 14 landscapes hung in the Paris offices of the magazine La Vie moderne, the first time Sisley had a room to himself.