The Plain at Veneux-Nadon

The Plain at Veneux-Nadon of 1881, held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, depicts the wide agricultural flatness of the territory Sisley had recently adopted after his move from Sèvres to the Loing valley region. The Veneux plain, lying between the forest edge and the Loing river, presented him with expansive horizontal subjects quite different from the enclosed village views and river banks of his earlier work — broad fields under wide skies that encouraged a more panoramic compositional approach. This opening up of the compositional space reflects Sisley adjusting his practice to a new landscape character, exploring the flat Fontainebleau region's particular qualities of light and space. Montreal's museum, assembling French Impressionist works through a period of active North American collecting, acquired this canvas as representative of Sisley's early Loing period work. The painting's presence in Quebec demonstrates how thoroughly French Impressionism had entered international collecting consciousness by the early twentieth century, spreading into institutions far removed from the Paris market that had originally ignored these paintings.

A high horizon line gives dominance to the expansive sky, rendered in loose horizontal strokes of white, grey, and pale blue. The flat plain is punctuated by warm earth tones and deep green accents, with thin, feathery brushwork suggesting distance across the fields.