The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne

This view of the Seine near Villeneuve-la-Garenne, just outside Paris, shows a suspension bridge crossing the river towards the village. Sisley painted it in 1872, while he was working around the Île-Saint-Denis, where he produced several paintings of river scenes. In the foreground there are boats and, on the water and along the bank, people who seem to be enjoying a day out, a detail that gives the scene a calm, everyday mood. The bridge, built in 1844, was replaced around 1900, and today the riverside road that leads north from it bears the name Quai Alfred Sisley, a tribute that reflects the painter's connection to the place. The work shows Sisley's Impressionist approach well: loose brushwork, attention to light on the water and to the ordinary life of the riverbank, without dramatic gestures. Its path through various dealers and owners, from the merchants who bought it shortly after it left the artist's studio to its arrival in New York, illustrates how such landscapes circulated in the market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It now belongs to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it stands as a record of a suburban landscape that no longer looks as it did when Sisley painted it.

Painter

Alfred Sisley

Date

1872

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

50 × 65 cm

Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Movement

Impressionism

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

bark, bridge, suspension bridge, Seine, broad-leaved tree, chimney, Villeneuve-la-Garenne, roof tile

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