Piazza ad Argenteuil

Late in 1871 Claude Monet moved out to Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine just downstream of Paris, and over the next few years it became a kind of open-air studio for the painters soon to be called Impressionists. France was barely a year past its defeat by Prussia and the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, yet none of that enters the picture. Sisley came out to visit his friend, and in 1872 the two of them worked the same streets, at times the very same view. This is Sisley's: the Rue de la Chaussee running back between low houses, a few walkers, the bell tower of the town church, Saint-Denys, closing the far end. A Paris collector later bought it and in 1906 left it to the French state.