Vista do Canal Saint-Martin

Alfred Sisley showed this view of the Canal Saint-Martin at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1870. A few months later France was at war with Prussia, the Salon world scattered, and Sisley's own family fortune was wiped out by the fighting. He had chosen an unglamorous subject on purpose, a working canal cut through Paris, lined with warehouses and moored barges, one of the arteries that fed the city. He painted it four times over. This canvas later passed to Doctor Paul Gachet, an art-loving physician remembered today for something else entirely, the care he gave Vincent van Gogh in the last weeks of his life 20 years on. Gachet paid 170 francs for the Sisley.