The Road from Versailles to Saint-Germain

A bend in the road with tiny, rapidly drawn figures appears amid the lush, green trees on the left. To the right, the landscape opens out with a view of a vineyard on a distant hill. Rather than simply representing the specifics of a location, Alfred Sisley painted the glorious golden light of a summer's day, flickering in the trees and the long grasses. He painted this plein air landscape study somewhere near the road on the way from Versailles to Saint-Germain. The painting's broken strokes of brilliant color and the impressionistic brushstrokes that serve as figures would have defined it as a rough sketch, but Sisley judged it complete and presented it as a beautiful finished work.