The Meadow at Veneux-Nadon

In March 1882 the Impressionists put on their seventh group show, in rented rooms on the rue Saint-Honore in Paris. Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had been keeping several of them afloat, organised it and carried the cost, and Degas and the painters around him stayed out of it. What was left was largely landscape. Sisley sent 27 canvases, nearly all from the Loing valley southeast of Paris where he had moved two years earlier, and this meadow was among them. He had painted it the previous summer, a wide field with slim poplars spaced across it, the ground opening away behind them. In 1888 the picture crossed the Atlantic to Catholina Lambert, an English-born silk manufacturer who had built himself a castle above Paterson, New Jersey, with a picture gallery attached to it. His silk business failed, and in February 1916 he sold the collection over four nights in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York.