The Road to Mantes

When the Musée d'Orsay opened in 1986 it took the Impressionists out of the Louvre, so a Sisley landscape still hanging in the older museum takes people by surprise. This one came in with the collection Hélène and Victor Lyon gave to the French state in 1961, and the gift carried an express condition that the pictures never be split up. Their son Édouard kept the use of them until 1977, so the Lyon Monets, Renoirs, Degas and this Sisley only went up on the walls after that. Sisley painted it in 1874, a road running out toward Mantes, a town on the Seine about 50 kilometres west of Paris. That summer he crossed to England and spent several months painting the Thames at Hampton Court, financed by Jean-Baptiste Faure, an opera singer who had been buying his work.