The Seine near Bougival, Winter Morning

In April 1877 a group of painters took a set of rooms at 6 rue Le Peletier in Paris and for the first time put the word up over the door themselves, Exposition des Impressionnistes. Until then it had been a critic's insult that stuck. Gustave Caillebotte, a painter with money behind him, organised the show and paid for it, and Monet hung his canvases of the Gare Saint-Lazare there, full of steam and iron. This winter morning on the Seine near Bougival, painted three years earlier, is recorded among the works Sisley sent. Bougival was a riverside village a short train ride west of the city, and he worked the same few kilometres of water over and over. After that spring Sisley stayed away from the group's exhibitions and did not show with them again until 1882.