La regata a Molesey

1874 was the year the Impressionists held their first exhibition together in Paris. Sisley skipped it. Instead he crossed to England for about four months, and near Hampton Court on the Thames he came upon the Molesey Regatta, an amateur rowing event only a year old at the time. What caught him was the day around it: the flags of several nations snapping in a brisk wind above the towpath, the crowd, the moving water. He painted it fast, in broken touches of bright colour. That regatta he stumbled on is still rowed on the same stretch of river each summer.