The Seine at Bougival 2

The Seine at Bougival 2 of 1877, held at the Munich Central Collecting Point, returns Sisley to the Seine location that had been the Impressionist group's shared territory in the early 1870s, but from the vantage of a painter who now had five years of intensive Impressionist practice behind him. By 1877 his treatment of the Bougival Seine is more assured and economical than the earlier versions — the brushwork freer, the tonal organisation more rapidly achieved, the compositional decisions made with less visible deliberation. The Munich Central Collecting Point provenance adds the twentieth-century history of displacement that affects many European paintings whose ownership histories were disrupted during the Nazi era and World War II. The Third Impressionist Exhibition, held in 1877, demonstrated the movement's endurance against persistent critical hostility; Sisley participated and this Bougival canvas may have been among the works presented. Bougival remained an important location in the Impressionist visual map of France even as the painters gradually dispersed to their various individual territories.

Sisley's 1877 Seine surfaces are treated with looser, more confident strokes than his early 1870s work — paint applied with a sureness suggesting intimate knowledge of this specific stretch of water. Reflections of sky and bank are differentiated from the water itself through subtle variations in stroke direction and pressure.