The Brickfield

In 1880 Sisley left the outskirts of Paris and moved southeast to Veneux-Nadon, a village on the sandy plain at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. A generation earlier that forest had drawn the Barbizon painters, who came for its old trees and its peasants. Sisley, just settled in, looked the other way, toward a working brickyard on the flat ground nearby. The sandy soil around the hamlet of Les Sablons fed a modest local brick trade, and that is what he painted that first year: low sheds and worked clay under a wide, shifting sky. It opened a long stretch of work in this corner of the Loing valley, where over the next two decades he would paint the canal and the riverbanks at nearby Saint-Mammès dozens of times.