Waterworks at Marly

The brick building on the left is newer than the name it carries. For 133 years a huge wooden machine with 14 water wheels had stood on this stretch of the Seine near Bougival, lifting river water up the hill toward the fountains of Marly and Versailles. By the end it was raising only a sliver of what it had been built for, and it was taken down. Under Napoleon III the engineer Dufrayer built a new pumping station in its place in the 1850s, six wheels each 12 metres across, housed in plain modern brick.

That is what Sisley painted, around 1876, while he was living up the hill at Marly-le-Roi. He gives the pump house one corner and leaves the rest to the river, a few solitary figures on the bank and trees in full autumn colour behind. Dufrayer's wheels kept turning until 1963.