The church at Moret, Rainy Weather, Morning

In 1893 Sisley planted himself in front of one building and stayed there. He had been living in Moret-sur-Loing, a small town southeast of Paris, since 1889, and across that year and the next he painted its church of Notre-Dame about a dozen times from a window facing it, changing the hour, the season and the weather rather than the view. This is the wet morning, and the canvas stands upright, tall enough to take the whole tower. Monet was working the same way at the same moment on the west front of Rouen Cathedral, so through those two years two painters of the old Impressionist circle were each going over a single stone façade again and again. The picture ended up in Baden, a spa town in Switzerland, bought for their villa by Sidney and Jenny Brown, whose money came from the electrical firm Brown Boveri. The house has been open as a museum since 1990.