Snow Effect in Louveciennes

Sisley signed and dated this at the lower left, Sisley 74. He was living at Louveciennes, a village west of Paris, and he painted snow more often than most of the painters around him. Strong shadows run across the foreground and lead the eye toward a small group of people out walking. The earliest owner on record is Francois Depeaux, a coal industrialist from Rouen who bought Impressionist pictures by the dozen. He took more than fifty Sisleys between the mid-1880s and 1901 and supported the painter until Sisley died in 1899. In 1906 a divorce settlement forced his collection into a court-ordered sale, and 256 of his pictures went under the hammer in Paris on a single occasion. He bought 53 of them back through his dealer and gave them to the museum in Rouen. This one went another way, through collections in Geneva and Britain, and was bought for a Potsdam collection in 2017.