Nieve en Port-Marly, escarcha blanca

Sisley painted this by the Seine at Port-Marly in the autumn of 1872, two years before anyone had the word Impressionist to throw at him. He was after a specific thing, the pale morning light on ground stiffened by the first white frost, and the way it cooled every colour in the scene. It may well have hung in the very first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, where such loose, weather-chasing pictures baffled a public used to tidy finish. Sisley, English by parentage but Paris-born, stayed with this kind of quiet river landscape his whole career, long after his friends moved on. The painting came to Lille in 1949 through a private bequest.