Saint-Mammès

Painted in 1885, this light-filled scene depicts the small port and village of Saint-Mammés, lying at the confluence of the rivers Seine and Loing. This was one of Sisley's favourite places to paint and he captured it from a range of vantage points in an important extended series of paintings executed during the 1880s in which this central motif of a barn-like structure and rustic buildings often feature. Sisley employed a more robust technique for many of these pictures than he had previously used. In the present work the hot afternoon sun is suggested by the use of saturated primary colours handled energetically with sweeping marks, this has led some art historians to suggest that Sisley was at least partially aware of the developments of the Neo-Impressionists.
In 1880 Sisley had moved to Veneux-Nadon, a remote village seventy-five kilometres south-east of Paris. He was to remain in this very rural area for the rest of his life, living in a number of its picturesque villages and towns. The move may have been initially impelled by Sisley's increasingly strained financial circumstances of the late 1870s, but it was also a symbolic one: it was in the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau, the cradle of modern French landscape painting, that Sisley had painted during his formative years. Now delighting in the many converging waterways and the gently undulating terrain of this region of Ile-de-France, the critic Gustave Geffroy noted that, 'Sisley had finally found his countryside' (quoted in S. Patin, 'Veneux-Nadon and Moret-Sur-Loing: 1880-1899' in M. Stevens (ed.), Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 183).
Pitching his easel on the riverbank by the Quai de Seine in Saint-Mammés, the view in the present work looks upstream and eastwards, past the Saint-Mammés bridge over the Seine. The local economy was heavily reliant on the rivers and canal and this stretch of land bordering the Seine was a particularly busy area of the village, known for its boat-yards, chandlers and refuelling stops. Here, Sisley presents us with a landscape which not only translates the vibrancy and shimmering heat of a summer's afternoon but also the every-day activity of the village. Figures work at the water's edge and come and go along the path at the right hand side of the painting, animating the landscape and encapsulating the daily bustle of the village which he so enjoyed painting.