La prairie

In January 1880, Sisley moved from the outskirts of Paris to the town of Veneux-Nadon, located at the confluence of the Seine and Loing rivers, and close to the forest of Fontainebleau. His interest in the region first arose the year prior, when he painted the nearby Moret-sur-Loing, the town in which he would ultimately live the last years of his life. In Veneux-Nadon, Sisley found a sizeable home with its own potager, or kitchen garden, facing the rue de By and only a few minutes’ walk from the train station. It was here that he was to make his home for two years as he explored new approaches to the landscape genre.
The countryside would have been quite a contrast to the hustle of the Parisian suburbs, and Sisley quickly grasped the visual potential that surrounded his home. The region offered a variety of landscapes, from farmland and fields to rivers, cottage gardens, and constantly, endlessly variable light. ‘It is at Moret – in this thickly wooded countryside with its tall poplars, the waters of the river Loing here, so beautiful, so translucent, so changeable, at Moret my art has undoubtedly developed most,’ he later reflected. ‘I will never really leave this little place that is so picturesque’ (quoted in R. Shone, Alfred Sisley, London, 1999, p. 123). Sisley spent much of 1880 traversing the land and the new atmospheric effects enabled him to push his landscape practice to new heights.
In La prairie, a quietly luminous view from 1880 painted shortly after this move, Sisley concentrated his attention on a well-trodden path meandering through an overgrown field of grasses adorned with touches of blazing red. To the right, the river curves along the meadow, its waters dark and serene. Leafy trees line its banks, here rendered from inky greens and dabs of violet. Overhead, soft clouds dot the blue sky. Sisley has painted the trail as a continuous band that extends from the edge of the canvas to the horizon as if the viewer could step into this bucolic scene. First developed during the Renaissance, the methodical unfolding of pictorial space into a receding depth was a hallmark of academic landscape practice, and one which the artist often employed. Yet despite the rigorously structured nature of the composition, La prairie evokes a sense of exuberance in its execution, felt particularly in the movement of plants and water.
Sisley’s paintings from this period are often compared to those of Claude Monet. Both artists approached their motifs with the same force of concentration – and often returned to the same sites over an extended period of time – and they shared a commitment to the ephemerality of the natural world. Unlike Monet, however, Sisley was less interested in obsessive observation. Instead, he relished returning to the same scene from different vantage points. Perhaps an apt parallel can be found in the oeuvre of Camille Pissarro, who would revisit again and again his favourite motifs as he endeavoured to chart the effects of the changing seasons. Likewise, Sisley, too, spent his time exploring the countryside around Veneux-Nadon, entirely consumed by what he encountered. This region would remain his central inspiration for the rest of his career.
La prairie was previously in the esteemed Picq-Véron Collection. M. Picq-Véron was a great collector of Sisley’s work, and several paintings from the collection are now held in museums worldwide including Premières neiges à Louveciennes, rue de Voisins (Brame and Lorenceau, no. 21; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Neige à Louveciennes (Brame and Lorenceau, no. 57; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), and Un verger au printemps à By, près de Moret-sur-Loing (Brame and Lorenceau, no. 456, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).