The Cote du Coeur-Volant at Marly-le-Roi, under Snow

The Côte du Coeur-Volant at Marly-le-Roi under Snow of 1877, at the Musée d'Orsay, represents the culmination of Sisley's sustained winter painting across his Marly years. The 'Stolen Heart Hill' — a named local toponym that gives the work a specific address within the Marly landscape — was a hillside road he painted in multiple versions. Under snow, the road's descent becomes a study in blue-grey shadow and cool white light, the trees stripped of foliage and reduced to their structural skeletons. Sisley's winter paintings are the works that most directly challenged comparison with Monet — whose snowscapes from Argenteuil in the early 1870s had established a benchmark — and critical consensus has often judged Sisley's winter canvases superior for their atmospheric stillness and chromatic subtlety. The 1877 date places this at the end of his Marly period, just before financial pressure forced yet another move in an unsettled domestic life. That hardship is entirely invisible in the painting's serene command of winter landscape.

The snow-covered hillside road is rendered through the characteristic Sisley winter palette — blue-white for snow, violet-grey shadows, pale ochre where earth shows through. The trees along the hillside are bare branches traced against the white, with their shadows extending across the snow surface. The sky above is carefully graduated from the pale horizon.