The Canal du Loing at Moret

By 1892 Alfred Sisley had been living in Moret-sur-Loing for ten years, a small town southeast of Paris threaded with waterways. He painted its canal, its bridge and its poplars over and over, in every weather. Here the canal curves away between a tall row of bare trees until it slips over the horizon, and more than half the canvas is given to the sky. Sisley once said he always began a painting with the sky, that it set everything else. He stayed poor his whole life and sold little. Only after he died in 1899 did his friends, led by Monet, raise the money to buy this and give it to the French state.