Alfred Sisley

On a sunny afternoon in September, Sisley painted this charming composition of a woman sitting in a boat that drifts along the river on the way to Veneux. Veneux-Nadon was a village on the Loing river, near the small town of Moret-sur-Loing and just south of the water’s intersection with the Seine at St-Mammès. Between 1880 and 1882 Sisley executed several compositions on the banks of the Seine, setting up his easel along the footpath that lead from his home in Veneux-Nadon to the river. In his monograph on the artist, Richard Shone has written the following about this picturesque landscape 75 kilometers outside of Paris: ‘One of the areas that Sisley first discovered and to which he returned over the following three years was the Seine-side path from Veneux. The bank of the Seine is closely wooded here. Downstream, along the river’s edge, a path leads to By and Thoméry, villages high up on the rocky cliff above. Broad and gleaming, the river makes a tremendous loop on its way north. 'The Seine is superb,’ wrote one enthusiast, 'broad unmoving expanses of water stretch out between high wooded slopes, the branches coming right down to the river'' (R. Shone, Sisley, New York, 1992, p. 129).

According to the Catalogue raisonné compiled by François Daulte, this painting was completed in 1882, but it seems more probable, given the title and its exhibition history, that Sisley began working on this composition in September 1881. In March 1882, he participated in the seventh official Impressionist exhibition in Paris, in which the present work was presented with the title Après-midi de septembre en bateau. This was the fourth and last time that Sisley collaborated with the Impressionist group, and En canot à Veneux - après-midi de septembre is an example of his style at the pinnacle of his involvement in the movement.