The Moret Bridge in the Sunlight

Among Sisley's many views of the Moret bridge, this sunlit version ranks among the most luminous — the direct light pressing down on the medieval stonework and flattening the reflections in the river below. He appears to have worked on it on a clear summer or early autumn day when the sun was high enough to eliminate most shadow from the bridge's southern face. The subject carried art-historical resonance: stone bridges over French rivers had been a staple of Barbizon landscape since Corot and Daubigny, and Sisley's return to the motif acknowledged that tradition while insisting on strictly contemporary optical analysis of light. Unlike his more sombre bridge studies, this version suggests the influence of the renewed attention to full sunlight that swept through the Impressionist circle in the late 1880s.

The bridge stonework is rendered almost entirely in warm whites, creams, and pale ochres, with shadows reduced to thin violet-grey washes. The water reflections below are painted in broken horizontal marks, the color of the stone above thinned and disrupted by the river's movement.