.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The village of Louveciennes, situated around thirty kilometres to the west of Paris, was used as a base by Sisley, Pissarro, Monet and Renoir in 1869-70. Their paintings of Louveciennes and the surrounding area - Bougival, Voisins, Pont-Marly and Marly-le-Roi - saw a flowering of the early Impressionist style and have led to the region being christened the 'cradle of Impressionism'.
Sisley moved to Louveciennes with his family in the late summer of 1870, taking a house on the rue de la Princesse. Over the following eight years he explored the village through his art more than any other of his contemporaries. He returned again and again to the motif of a turning road as it acted as a ready fulcrum for a composition and leant itself especially well to Sisley's impulse for spatial organisation. A road also invited a human presence into his pictures, a landscape convention to which Sisley held firm.
Hand in hand with his enduring classicism, the increasing liberation of Sisley's facture mark out the mid-1870s as an important phase in his art. The fractured, varied strokes of the present work - adapting as readily to the diagonals of the verdure and steep incline of the verge at the left as to the horizontals of the warm glow of the mackerel sky - allow the white ground to show through, unifying the tonality of the whole image. Moreover, a careful structural emphasis on those points of furthest recession, particularly the pivotal cleft between the avenue of trees on the horizon, is enhanced with warm impasto, thus propelling them forward towards the spectator.
Un chemin à Louveciennes was included in the sale of the collection of Baron Blanquet de Fulde in 1900. Although the main strength of the collection was in Barbizon works - Corot, Daubigny, Dupré and Harpignies all feature - as well as a fine Courbet from the series of Les casseurs de pierres, today housed in the Oskar Reinhart Foundation in Winterthur, Blanquet de Fulde owned two other Sisleys, Le barrage du Loing à Sainte-Mammès (D.597) and Une rue à Moret en hiver (D.780).
Sisley moved to Louveciennes with his family in the late summer of 1870, taking a house on the rue de la Princesse. Over the following eight years he explored the village through his art more than any other of his contemporaries. He returned again and again to the motif of a turning road as it acted as a ready fulcrum for a composition and leant itself especially well to Sisley's impulse for spatial organisation. A road also invited a human presence into his pictures, a landscape convention to which Sisley held firm.
Hand in hand with his enduring classicism, the increasing liberation of Sisley's facture mark out the mid-1870s as an important phase in his art. The fractured, varied strokes of the present work - adapting as readily to the diagonals of the verdure and steep incline of the verge at the left as to the horizontals of the warm glow of the mackerel sky - allow the white ground to show through, unifying the tonality of the whole image. Moreover, a careful structural emphasis on those points of furthest recession, particularly the pivotal cleft between the avenue of trees on the horizon, is enhanced with warm impasto, thus propelling them forward towards the spectator.
Un chemin à Louveciennes was included in the sale of the collection of Baron Blanquet de Fulde in 1900. Although the main strength of the collection was in Barbizon works - Corot, Daubigny, Dupré and Harpignies all feature - as well as a fine Courbet from the series of Les casseurs de pierres, today housed in the Oskar Reinhart Foundation in Winterthur, Blanquet de Fulde owned two other Sisleys, Le barrage du Loing à Sainte-Mammès (D.597) and Une rue à Moret en hiver (D.780).