La nieve en Louveciennes

Snow gave the Impressionists something they wanted badly, a surface that looked white but was really full of colour, changing with every shift of light. Sisley loved it more than most of them. He painted this narrow lane in Louveciennes, the village west of Paris where he had been living, sometime around 1875, laying blue-grey and faint yellow and green into the whites of the path and the rooftops. A single small figure walks away from us into the cold. There is no incident and no story, just a quiet street under snow. Sisley kept painting weather like this for the rest of his life, often while short of money, and his winter scenes are among the work he is most admired for now.