Storr Rock, Lady’s Cove, Le Soir

Storr Rock at Lady's Cove, named with the French subtitle Le Soir (Evening), is now held at the National Museum Cardiff, an appropriate institutional home for one of the most site-specific works in Sisley's Welsh series. The painting depicts one of the prominent rock formations that punctuate the Gower coastline, rendered at the evening hour when falling light gives rock faces their warmest most modelled appearance. Lady's Cove, near the Mumbles on Swansea Bay, was accessible by the Swansea and Mumbles Railway — one of the world's earliest passenger railways — suggesting Sisley reached the site as part of the same leisure infrastructure his paintings depict as scenery. The National Museum's holding of multiple Sisley Wales works reflects a conscious effort to preserve the series' local significance.

The rock formation receives the painting's most controlled and considered treatment: Sisley describes its faceted surfaces through careful tonal gradation, identifying light-struck planes and shadow faces with greater spatial exactness than he typically brings to vegetation or water. Evening warmth is rendered in the ochre and sienna tones modifying the grey rock base.