Les moulins de Moret–Hiver

In 1889, Sisley moved with his family from Veneux-Nadon, near the confluence of the Seine and the Loing, to the neighboring village of Moret, which would remain his home—and almost the exclusive subject of his art—until his death a decade later. “It is at Moret,” he wrote to the critic Adolphe Tavernier in 1892, “in this thickly wooded countryside with its tall poplars, the waters of the river Loing here, so beautiful, so translucent, so changeable; at Moret my art has undoubtedly developed the most. I will never really leave this little place that is so picturesque” (quoted in R. Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, p. 123).
Although Sisley worked within the walls of Moret only intermittently, he captured the view across the Loing toward the town from every possible angle, shifting his position or simply adjusting his sight line to create a veritable visual map of his new home. In the present Moulins de Moret, he focused his attention on the Provencher mill, which stood in the center of the Loing, where the water was deepest and the current strongest, directly alongside the stately stone bridge that linked Moret with the regional road to Saint-Mammès.
Sisley painted this panoramic vista—a symphony of blues and browns, with enlivening touches of orange among the houses in the middle distance—on a blustery, winter day. The bare poplar trunks form a planar, decorative screen across the foreground, and the choppy waters of the Loing have inundated their banks, submerging the base of the trees. Like Monet and Pissarro, who also painted scenes of flood, Sisley was fascinated with the myriad, ephemeral ways that floodwater transforms and destabilizes even the most familiar landscape. Here, the river encroaches on the artist’s implicit vantage point, leaving only a narrow strip of solid ground in the foreground. Whereas the mill represents man’s effort to tame the river, the flood embodies nature’s untrammeled force, rendered with Sisley’s characteristic subtlety and restraint.
The first owner of the present painting was the Rouen industrialist François Depeaux, one of Sisley’s most loyal patrons during his final decade. In 1897, Depeaux financed the artist’s trip to Great Britain, a rare interruption in the quiet pattern of his work and life at Moret, during which he wed his long-time partner Eugénie Lescouezec. Following Sisley’s death on 29 January 1899, Depeaux collaborated with Monet and Tavernier to organize an auction benefiting the artist’s children Pierre and Jeanne. In 1906, as part of his divorce proceedings, Depeaux was forced to sell over a hundred works from his collection, including Les moulins de Moret.