The Church in Moret under the Morning Rain

The church Sisley set up in front of in 1893 had taken about 300 years to finish. It was dedicated in 1166 by Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was then living in exile in France, and the west front and bell tower that face the painter went up much later, in the flamboyant Gothic of the 15th century. Notre-Dame stands in the middle of Moret-sur-Loing, a small town on the river Loing southeast of Paris, where Sisley had been living since 1889 and where he told the critic Adolphe Tavernier he had done his best work.

The title gives the conditions rather than a subject: rain, in the morning. He had been painting the town for four years by then, and the church stood a few streets from his door.

The canvas reached Scotland in 1980, when the British government accepted it in place of inheritance tax and allocated it to the Hunterian in Glasgow.