The Church at Moret at Dawn

In 1893 Alfred Sisley was living at Moret-sur-Loing, a small town southeast of Paris where the Loing runs into the Seine, in a house across the street from the church of Notre-Dame. Over that year and the next he painted the same corner of it about 14 times, mostly from an upstairs window: the west door and the long south wall of the nave, under different weather and at different hours of the day. Claude Monet was working through his views of Rouen Cathedral in exactly those years, and Sisley's church is usually discussed alongside them. This is one of the morning-light versions, signed and dated 93. The canvas stands taller than it is wide, so the buttresses and the corner turret stack up its height, and the small figures in the street below keep the church inside its town.