The Slopes of Celle-sous-Moret Seen from St. Mammes

The Slopes of Celle-sous-Moret Seen from Saint-Mammès depicts the view eastward from the Seine-Loing confluence toward the rising ground of Celle-sous-Moret, the wooded hill that forms the backdrop to many of Sisley's Loing valley compositions. He painted this view repeatedly from Saint-Mammès, finding in the combination of the flat alluvial plain in the foreground, the river's curve, and the wooded slopes beyond a compositional richness that sustained his attention across different seasons. The title's topographic precision reflects Sisley's practice of carefully documenting his exact viewpoint—a habit that makes his work particularly valuable as a visual record of the Loing valley landscape before twentieth-century development.

The composition organizes the landscape into a series of horizontal bands—the flat foreground plain, the river curve, the rising slopes, and the sky—each rendered in progressively lighter and cooler tones to suggest depth through atmospheric recession. Sisley handles the wooded slopes with his characteristic loose foliage strokes, the green of the trees grading from deeper in the foreground to lighter and bluer in the distance.