The Loing Canal, Moret

The Loing Canal, Moret at the Musée d'Orsay, painted in 1902, depicts the medieval town on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau where Alfred Sisley had lived and worked from 1880 until his death in 1899. Pissarro's Moret paintings, made in the early 1900s, are visits to territory marked by the memory of Sisley — his most lyrical and atmospheric fellow Impressionist, whose death in January 1899 ended the last significant career of the founding generation of the movement. Where Sisley's Moret paintings emphasize the atmospheric quality of the town — the medieval towers reflected in the Loing, the misty light of autumn mornings — Pissarro's approach is more structurally focused. The Loing canal, with its controlled water and precise stone banks, offered a geometrically organized water subject different from the free-flowing Seine of his Pontoise years. The Orsay's holding of this late Moret landscape places it in the context of Pissarro's final decade — the period when he was simultaneously producing his major urban series and revisiting locations associated with his own career and with his colleagues.

The canal surface provides a horizontal reflective element that Pissarro works with his most careful water-handling technique, the reflections of buildings and sky captured in slightly blurred, vertical strokes that distinguish reflected from solid. The medieval town architecture in the background provides warm stone tones in ochres and pinks, contrasting with the cool greens and blues of the water.