Automne : bords de la Seine près de Bougival

Sisley painted this riverbank at Bougival in 1873, a village on the Seine just downstream from Paris where the new painters liked to set up. It was the last autumn before everything shifted for them. The following spring, shut out of the official Salon, Sisley and his friends would hang their canvases together in a photographer's old studio, the show that got them called Impressionists. This picture is the kind of thing that puzzled visitors, an ordinary bend of the river with the trees turning, the water and the pale sky treated as carefully as any important subject. Sisley, the son of English parents, would go on painting these Seine villages for the rest of his life.