Le chemin des Petits-Prés à By, temps d'orage

By 1880 Sisley had left Paris behind and settled in the countryside south-east of the city, near the hamlet of By on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. He painted the same few lanes over and over in different weather, and here he took one of them under a breaking storm. The trees are nearly bare, the branches thin against a heavy sky, and the brushwork loosens as if the wind were pulling at it. Of the Impressionists he sold the least in his lifetime and kept mostly to these quiet rural roads. He painted the same path again the following year in spring light, calm where this one is unsettled.