Village on the Banks of the Seine

In 1872 France was picking itself up after a lost war with Prussia and the bloody months of the Paris Commune the year before. Sisley spent that spring a short train ride north of the city, at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a riverside village on the Seine that Parisians were only beginning to reach by rail for a day by the water. He set his easel on the bank and painted the far shore: pale pink and yellow houses under a wide sky, the current carrying broken reflections. Sisley was born in Paris to English parents and returned to this stretch of the Seine again and again. The little boats moored along the near bank were the weekend traffic of a suburb learning to relax again.