Pequenos prados na primavera, By

In 1880 Alfred Sisley moved his family out to the countryside where the Seine runs past the forest of Fontainebleau, near the town of Moret. This view looks down a footpath the locals called the way through the small meadows, between the hamlets of Veneux and By, and a girl in a blue dress with flowers in her bonnet walks ahead of us down the track. By now the Impressionists who had first exhibited together in the 1870s were drifting apart and out of Paris, and Sisley, always the poorest of them, kept to landscape while the others moved on. He signed the canvas but never dated it, so it may in fact be the spring of 1881. The light he was chasing here is the pale, flickering green of the year's first growth.