Sisley painted View of the Canal Saint-Martin and exhibited it at the Paris Salon of 1870, an early public milestone for his landscape practice just before the upheavals of war reshaped where he could work.
Amid the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, Sisley left the capital and stayed in Louveciennes (autumn 1870), initiating an extended period of painting the western suburbs and Seine-adjacent villages that shaped his mature Impressionist landscapes.
Sisley produced flood imagery along the Seine in 1872, including Ferry to the Ile-de-la-Loge – Flood, using the swollen river as a motif for reflections and atmosphere—an approach he would revisit more intensively in 1876.
By 1873 Sisley was deeply focused on Louveciennes and its environs, consolidating his approach to roadways, village edges, and open skies as recurring compositional structures in his French landscape practice.
During the same 1874 English campaign, Sisley painted Regatta at Molesey near Hampton Court, extending his Thames studies to include contemporary leisure activity while retaining his primary focus on river atmosphere and sky.
Sisley participated in the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris (April 1874), aligning his landscape work with the independent group that challenged the Salon system and helped define Impressionism as a movement.
In 1874 Sisley made a summer visit to England and painted multiple Thames views around Hampton Court, exploring shifting light and weather on open water—among them The Thames at Hampton Court and Under Hampton Court Bridge.
In 1875 Sisley moved to Marly-le-Roi, where he repeatedly painted the village watering place (L’Abreuvoir), using it as a stable structure against which to register seasonal and meteorological variation in the surrounding French landscape.
When the Seine flooded extensively in spring 1876, Sisley produced a concentrated group of flood paintings at Port-Marly, emphasizing mirrored surfaces, unstable ground, and everyday adaptation to disaster; the Musée d’Orsay notes he made six paintings of this event.
In February 1880 Sisley moved to the countryside near Moret-sur-Loing (Veneux-Nadon area), shifting his landscape base from the western suburbs of Paris toward the Loing valley, which would dominate his late work.
Sisley settled in Moret-sur-Loing in September 1882, drawn to its waterways and medieval townscape; the Loing and nearby canal became central subjects for sustained landscape exploration through the 1890s.
In 1893–1894 Sisley executed about a dozen paintings of the Church of Notre-Dame at Moret, systematically varying time of day, season, and weather to study atmosphere—an explicitly serial approach within his French late-period landscapes.
Sisley visited England and Wales in 1897 (commonly given as July–September) and formally married Eugénie Leszouezec in Cardiff on 1897-08-05, linking a late British journey to his personal life late in his career.
Sisley died at Moret-sur-Loing on 1899-01-29, closing a final two-decade phase largely devoted to the Loing valley and Moret motifs that cemented his reputation as an Impressionist specialist in landscape.
Alfred Sisley: Landscape Studies in England and France (1870–1899)
