La Seine, vue des coteaux de By

La Seine, vue des coteaux de By of 1881 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers takes Sisley to an elevated viewpoint on the wooded hillsides above the Seine — By being a small village near the river offering slopes from which the broad valley could be surveyed panoramically. Such elevated viewpoints were unusual in Sisley's predominantly horizontal approach to river landscape, where the painter typically positioned himself at or near water level to maximise the reflective surface. The higher vantage gave him access to wider compositional horizons, the Seine valley floor spread below with its villages, fields, and river, a distant view more typical of the school of Barbizon plein-air landscape than his characteristic intimate bankside perspective. Angers, one of France's major provincial cities, has long maintained a significant art collection that surveys French painting across centuries, and this relatively early Loing-period Sisley documents the transitional moment when he was exploring the full spatial range of his new geographical territory.

The elevated viewpoint allows Sisley to treat the Seine as a luminous band in the middle distance rather than an immediate foreground subject — the river reflecting light back through the landscape in a way that unifies the composition. Foreground slopes with their vegetation are rendered more broadly to suggest nearness, while the distant Seine is painted with delicate atmospheric strokes.