The Loing Canal at Moret

A British painter active in France, Sisley was a quintessential representative of the Impressionist movement, although he was often overshadowed by his contemporaries Monet and Renoir, with whom he painted the forest around Fontainebleau early in his career. After spending some years in Paris, Sisley lived in several villages along the Seine and Loing rivers; he settled permanently in Moret-sur-Loing in 1889. By restricting himself to just a few favored subjects, Sisley was able to focus on the changing effects of light and color that occurred in the surrounding landscape. Critics noted that Sisley’s original coloring, particularly his use of a lilac-tinted blue, set his work apart from his fellow Impressionists. Sisley’s focus on the sky as a significant compositional element led the Symbolist writer Camille Mauclair to call him “the painter of French skies, which he presents with admirable vivacity and facility.” A landscape painter to the near exclusion of all other subjects, Sisley enjoyed a fair amount of commercial success early on in his career, but fell on harder financial times later in his life. Nevertheless, his work enjoyed a strong standing among his artistic peers. When Henri Matisse asked Camille Pissarro to identify an exemplary Impressionist, Pissarro named Sisley.

In this work, Sisley’s freely applied paint activates the surface of the canvas to convey the effect of the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the leaves of the trees and the water in the canal below. Specific details are secondary to the synthesis of color and light in the definition of the forms of the trees, the canal, and the architecture. In contrast to Monet’s tendency to dissolve form in a bath of light and color, Sisley used light and color to enhance the structure of his compositions. He felt that a lively painting surface was the most significant aspect of a work and it “should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist” to depict the subject.