冬季莫雷教堂

While Monet was over in Normandy painting the great front of Rouen cathedral again and again, Alfred Sisley took up the same idea on something far humbler, the parish church of Moret-sur-Loing, the small town on the river Loing where he had settled for good. Across 1893 and 1894 he painted its stone flank more than a dozen times from an upstairs window across the road, following the light through the hours and the seasons. This is one of the winter versions, the church gone cold and grey beneath a low sky. Sisley never had Monet's luck with collectors. He died at Moret in 1899, in the town whose church he had painted through every kind of weather.