Barcazas en Billancourt

By 1877 the stretch of the Seine at Billancourt, just west of Paris, was already turning industrial, and Sisley painted the working river rather than a pretty one, with barges moored along the bank, low sheds, and a wide pale sky doing most of the work. Within a generation this same riverside would be swallowed by the Renault car factories. Sisley showed with the Impressionists that spring, in their third group exhibition, and stayed the least fashionable of them, faithful to plain water and weather. The canvas later disappeared into the private collection of a German industrialist, Otto Krebs, and after 1945 sat unseen in the Hermitage for half a century before it was shown again.