The Church in Moret after the Rain

In the early 1890s Claude Monet planted himself in front of Rouen Cathedral and painted the same stone face of it again and again, chasing the light as it shifted through the day. A few hours south, in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, Alfred Sisley was quietly running his own version of that experiment. He had settled there for good, and from an upstairs window across the street he painted the church of Notre-Dame more than a dozen times across 1893 and 1894, in morning sun, in frost, and here in the flat grey light after a rain. Sisley was the least celebrated of the original Impressionists. He died in Moret in 1899, months before his work began to fetch the prices it does now. This is the canvas he caught just after the rain, the porch stone still dark and wet.