La Route de Saint-Germain à Marly

Alfred Sisley painted this quiet road in 1872, in the countryside west of Paris, near the villages of Saint-Germain and Marly. It was a raw moment to be painting calm. France had just lost a war to Prussia, Paris had come through the violence of the Commune, and Sisley's own security, English money from his father's business, had been wrecked in the collapse, leaving him poor for the rest of his life. He kept to untroubled things: a road, some walls and trees, a few small figures, laid down in broad open strokes. Two years on, this canvas hung in the first Impressionist exhibition, in the spring of 1874, the show where a critic turned the word Impressionist into a jibe. Most of the mockery fell on Monet and Cezanne. Sisley, one reviewer wrote, was the most harmonious of them all.