La pradera

Sisley painted this in 1875 on the edge of Louveciennes, the village west of Paris where several of the young Impressionists were then working. Look into the meadow and you can find two small girls in blue aprons and straw hats, nearly swallowed by grass grown up to their shoulders and scattered with daisies and poppies. Sisley rarely painted people close up or told a story. What held him was weather and ground and the particular green of a wet French field, and he keeps the paint loose and the light soft and even, the way it falls on an overcast day rather than in bright sun. A friend was working more or less beside him that season. Renoir painted almost this exact stretch of grass, a canvas now known as Path through the Tall Grass.