The Road from Versailles to Saint-Germain

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Artist: Alfred Sisley (English / French, English, 1839–1899)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 51.1 × 65.1 cm (20 1/8 × 25 5/8 in.)
Culture: English
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

A bend in the road with tiny, rapidly drawn figures appears amid the lush, green trees on the left. To the right, the landscape opens out with a view of a vineyard on a distant hill. Rather than simply representing the specifics of a location, Alfred Sisley painted the glorious golden light of a summer's day, flickering in the trees and the long grasses. He painted this plein air landscape study somewhere near the road on the way from Versailles to Saint-Germain. The painting's broken strokes of brilliant color and the impressionistic brushstrokes that serve as figures would have defined it as a rough sketch, but Sisley judged it complete and presented it as a beautiful finished work.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.