Un coin de bois aux Sablons

In the summer of 1883 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel gave Sisley a one-man show in Paris, one of a run of solo exhibitions he put on for the Impressionists that year, at a time when the group had stopped showing together. That autumn Sisley moved back to Veneux-les-Sablons, a village near Moret-sur-Loing, and this is a corner of the wood on its edge.

The museum keeps an older second title for it, La route à l'orée du bois, the road at the edge of the wood, which says plainly what you are looking at: a track running out from under the trees with a walker on it.

Isaac de Camondo, a banker and collector, bought the painting in 1901 and left his whole collection to the Louvre in 1911, on condition that it stayed together for 50 years. The rooms holding it opened in 1920.