The story
In 1880 Alfred Sisley, the Anglo-French Impressionist, painted a wooded path beside the Seine near Moret, the Chemin des Petits-Prés at By, under a sky gathering for a storm. His dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, bought it the next year. French records class the picture as probably looted during the Second World War. It was found in Bavaria in 1949, sent back to France, and is now held by the state for its rightful heirs. In 2012 it was deposited here, in Meudon, just south-west of Paris.
The house around it is one of the oldest in town, a 16th-century dwelling on the rue des Pierres. Armande Béjart, the actress who was Molière's widow, kept it as her country home until her death in 1700, and the museum moved in during 1943. Upstairs, a room on Meudon's own history leads to French landscapes painted between about 1790 and 1950, then to painting and sculpture of the postwar School of Paris. Behind the house a terraced sculpture garden opens onto the national estate of Meudon.
