Filets séchant

This was painted in early 1872, on the Seine at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a village just north of Paris, in a France still catching its breath after the war with Prussia and the upheaval of the Commune the year before. The Impressionists had no name yet, their first show still two years off, so a canvas like this was genuinely new, worked in short choppy strokes for the grassy bank and looser dashes for the moving water. Fishing nets hang drying near the shore, and a bridge carries the eye across to the island of Saint-Denis. That same year the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel began buying Sisley almost by the armful, taking close to 60 of his pictures across 1872 and 1873.