The Bridge at Moret

Sisley was living at Les Sablons, a hamlet a short walk from Moret-sur-Loing, when he painted this in 1887 or 1888. The French title names the weather, effet d'orage, a storm effect, and he came back to this bridge many times in the decade that followed. Everything after that is a paper trail. His daughter Jeanne sold the canvas at auction in Paris in 1919. The Durand-Ruel gallery, which had handled Sisley in his lifetime, bought it in 1926. In 1940 it left France for Salzburg, acquired by the dealer Friedrich Welz for the Landesgalerie there, and in 1943 it was moved out to Sankt Gilgen. It came back to France in November 1947. The commission that sorted the works recovered in Germany could not establish whose it had been, so the state kept it, and it still carries the number that says so, MNR 203. It was sent to the museum in Le Havre in 1953 and hangs there on deposit from the musée d'Orsay.