The Road from Mantes to Choisy-le-Roi

In 1872 the Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had started backing the painters who would soon be called Impressionists, bought 29 canvases from Alfred Sisley in the first year the two men did business. Sisley was living west of Paris then, around Louveciennes, and he spent that year painting the roads leading out of those villages, one after another. This is one of them, a small canvas 46 by 56 centimetres, listed as number 20 in Francois Daulte's 1959 catalogue of Sisley's paintings. It left France early. The industrialist Lazare Weiller owned it until 1901, when it passed to the collector Gabriel Cognacq. It now belongs to the Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation, whose French paintings have been kept at the Yamagata Museum of Art, in northern Japan, since 1991.