Saint Mammès

Saint Mammès of 1885 at the Princeton Art Museum depicts the confluence town — the point where the Loing joins the Seine — that Sisley had been using as a working base and painting subject since moving to the Loing region in 1880. Saint-Mammès was both geographically significant, marking the boundary between his Loing valley territory and the broader Seine, and commercially active, its river port handling the barge traffic that carried Fontainebleau timber and stone to Paris. Sisley's Saint-Mammès paintings of the 1880s form a substantial and coherent body of work, their variety reflecting both the town's different viewpoints and the range of atmospheric conditions he documented across multiple visits. Princeton's Art Museum holds this 1885 canvas as part of its French painting collection, which includes several important Impressionist works acquired over the course of the twentieth century and now serving both as teaching resources and as significant scholarly holdings for the study of French nineteenth-century art.

Oil on canvas. River and canal subjects at Saint-Mammès gave Sisley the opportunity to study reflections — sky and architectural colour reproduced in the water's surface — a device that effectively doubled the chromatic information within the picture. His water surfaces are rendered with short horizontal strokes that convey both the flatness of calm water and its subtle movement.