The Pit Sawyers

Sawing a log into planks by hand took two men, one up on the trestle and one below it in the sawdust, pulling a long blade between them. By the 1870s mechanical sawmills were spreading through France and the travelling sawyers were losing their trade, though teams would still turn up in village yards for decades after this was painted. Sisley painted a pair of them in 1876, seen from behind in a village street with a few onlookers standing about. The Petit Palais, which owns the canvas, reads the setting as Marly-le-Roi, where he was living at the time. He showed the picture at the third Impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1877. Nearly everything else he made is landscape, with people in it as small incidents, which makes a scene of men at work unusual in his hands. The canvas came to the museum in June 1908, a gift from the collector Ferdinand Blumenthal.