The Seine, Seen from the Hills of By

On 12 March 1943, in occupied Paris, this quiet stretch of the Seine came up at the Hotel Drouot and sold for 361,000 francs. Within the month the Paris dealer Raphael Gerard had bought it for 423,000, and before the year was out it had gone to Berlin, to a German buyer named Wolfgang Kruger, for 850,000. Sisley painted it 62 years earlier from the slopes above the hamlet of By, a few kilometres from Moret-sur-Loing, in the stretch of country he moved to in 1880 and never left. He signed it twice, once at the lower left and once at the lower right. The picture was recovered after the war and handed to the Louvre in 1950, and it has never been returned to an owner. France still holds it under the number MNR 210 bis, the mark put on works whose history between 1933 and 1945 is incomplete. It has hung in Angers since 2010.