Landscape with Houses

Landscape with Houses of 1873, at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, belongs to Sisley's most productive early Impressionist period — the year before the first group exhibition and the year when his full personal style was definitively established. Strasbourg, France's largest Alsatian city, had been returned to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and would not return to France until 1918; the Museum's French collection was assembled during the period of German administration, creating a collection whose cultural identity bridged French and German collecting traditions. The landscape with houses subject represents the most characteristic early Sisley: a modest village or suburban setting in the Île-de-France, the houses providing architectural anchors within an atmospheric landscape composition, the light and sky dominating the subject over any particular topographic feature. His ability to find pictorial value in entirely unpretentious subjects — no famous views, no dramatic scenery, just the landscape of ordinary French provincial life — distinguished his approach within the Impressionist group.

Sisley applies his developing Impressionist technique — varied brushwork, attention to light conditions, naturalistic color — to a modest subject with characteristic understatement. Buildings and foliage are painted with the same open-air freshness, his palette cool and clear, without theatrical exaggeration.