Fog, Voisins

British by nationality, although he was born in Paris and spent almost all his life in France, Alfred Sisley settled at Voisins, a village near Louveciennes in Seine-et-Oise, in 1871. That is probably where he painted this fog effect with a hint of a fence in the background, foliage on the left, a tree with twisted branches on the right beneath which a crouching woman seems to be picking flowers. But more than a peasant woman in her garden, the protagonist of the painting is the silvery mist which blurs the shapes and the background into a bluish grey tone. It is not the thick London fog that Sisley and Monet knew on the banks of the Thames, but a subtle harmony, a silent poem. This canvas is an illustration of the Impressionist approach which sifts nature through the filter of visual sensation, here modified by the weather. Moreover, Fog, Voisins was painted in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition in Nadar's studio, to which Sisley contributed five paintings.