Rue de la tannerie à Moret-sur-Loing

Rue de la tannerie à Moret-sur-Loing of 1895 takes Sisley into the town's working commercial streets — the tannery district near the Loing river where animal hides were processed using traditional methods that had barely changed since the medieval period. By 1895 Sisley had lived in Moret for thirteen years and knew its streets with the intimacy of a longtime resident, but his architectural subjects within the town are less well known than his river and countryside views. The tannery street's proximity to the Loing made it part of the same riverside industrial world as the mills and canal locks he regularly painted, and its old buildings carried the texture of centuries of working use. The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami holds this as part of its French collection, one of the American university art museums that built significant holdings of French nineteenth-century painting in the twentieth century, creating teaching collections that also serve as research resources for Impressionist scholarship.

The narrow street creates a strong compositional channel leading the eye between stone building facades on either side. Sisley renders the aged stone walls in ochres and warm grays, light falling across irregular surfaces creating complex tonal variations that he captures with varied directional strokes.