Windy Day at Veneux

In 1882 Alfred Sisley was living at Veneux-Nadon, a hamlet on the edge of the forest south of Paris, on the road to the village of By. He was the quietest and poorest of the Impressionists, and by then he had stopped chasing the city. What he painted instead was weather. Here it is wind. You can read it in the brushwork, the strokes in the trees all leaning the same way, the clouds dragged sideways across a heavy sky, a bare ploughed field running up a low rise. Sisley would spend nearly all his remaining years within a few miles of this spot, painting the Loing valley in every season.