Viale di castagni a La Celle-Saint-Cloud

Sisley was about 25 when he painted this, years before the word Impressionism existed or anyone thought of him as one of its founders. In the 1860s the young Paris painters would head out to the woods, following the older Barbizon landscapes they admired, and here Sisley set up in the forest at La Celle-Saint-Cloud. He made it big, on the scale of a serious Salon picture, all deep filtered shade and a path opening between the tall chestnuts. The colour is still the heavy green of that older landscape tradition rather than the bright, broken touch he later became known for. The official Salon rejected it in 1867 regardless, and it went unsold for roughly ten years before the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, a patron of these painters, bought it.