Matinée de gelée à Louveciennes

Alfred Sisley painted this on a cold, bright morning in Louveciennes, the village west of Paris where he was living in 1873. It shows the ordinary main road and the tower of the local church, Saint-Martin, under a pale winter sky, with the low sun warming the frozen ground into faint golds and pinks against the cold blue of the shadows. Sisley worked the same few streets over and over in every season. This particular canvas later travelled a long way: in 1903 the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel sold it to the Russian collector Ivan Morozov, one of his earliest Impressionist buys, and it has hung in Moscow ever since.