La Barque pendant l'inondation, Port-Marly

In the spring of 1876 the river Seine burst its banks and flooded the village of Port-Marly, just west of Paris. Where you might expect a scene of disaster, Alfred Sisley saw water and light. He painted the flood six times, calm pictures in which a boat drifts over what used to be a street and a tavern stands with its lower floor underwater, its pink and yellow walls doubled in the still surface. He gave more than half the canvas to sky and reflection. Sisley was English by parentage but spent his life in France, and he stayed loyal to painting weather and landscape when other Impressionists moved on. He never sold well, and he was still poor when he died in 1899, just before prices for his work began to climb.