O Canal Saint-Martin

Sisley painted the Canal Saint-Martin in 1872, a working waterway that carried barges of grain and stone into the middle of Paris. The city was still catching its breath after a terrible year. The siege by Prussian troops and then the Commune had left parts of it burned and shaken only months before. None of that shows here. Sisley gives us an ordinary weekday on the water, moored boats, a towpath, plain warehouse fronts, a wide pale sky doing most of the work. He was two years away from joining the first Impressionist exhibition, and paintings like this, with no story and no polish, were exactly what critics would soon complain the group kept making. The little figures on the quay are barely more than a few loaded strokes of the brush.