Neighbourhood of Louveciennes

Around 1870 the village of Louveciennes, west of Paris, was full of painters. Camille Pissarro lived there, Auguste Renoir's parents had a house in the same commune, and Sisley settled close by. By 1876 the cluster had broken up. Pissarro had gone off to Pontoise, and Sisley had moved a few kilometres up the hill to Marly-le-Roi the year before, though he kept walking back to work the slopes and lanes outside Louveciennes. He put this one on an upright canvas, 61 centimetres tall and 46 wide, which is not the usual shape for open country. It reached Cologne in 2001, when the Swiss collectors Gérard and Marisol Corboud placed more than 170 Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum on permanent loan. The museum has carried their name beside its own ever since.