Street in Louveciennes

For more than a century this canvas was known as a street in Louveciennes, the name it carried when it entered the national collections in 1896. The Musée d'Orsay now places it a short way off, on the Chemin de la Briqueterie, the brickworks lane, at neighbouring Marly-le-Roi, where Sisley rented a house in the middle of the 1870s. The old name survives as its inventory title, and the museum dates the picture to around 1876. The canvas is a tall slot of green. Trees in full leaf close in on a sunlit lane, fences run along both sides, a red-roofed house sits low on the right, and a hillside rises pale in the gap between the branches. A woman in dark clothes walks in the shade. The painting spent 40 years on deposit at the Musée Masséna in Nice, from 1954 to 1994.