Saint-Mammès, Loing Canal (1885): Art, History and Details

Saint-Mammès, Loing Canal (1885) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alfred Sisley (French, 1840–1899).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The small town of Saint-Mammès is located about forty miles south of Paris, where the Seine and Loing rivers are joined by a canal. Alfred Sisley was fond of the area and often painted there in the 1880s, undoubtedly attracted by the low rents, since his poverty had become chronic in the wake of the bankruptcy and death of his father. Sisley rendered this view of the Saint-Mammès-Loring canal with a classic Impressionist technique, using pure color and soft, flickering brushwork that dissolves forms into a haze of optical sensations approximating the effect of brilliant, outdoor light.

Object facts

• Title: Saint-Mammès, Loing Canal
• Date: 1885
• Creator attribution: Alfred Sisley (French, 1840–1899)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 46.6 x 55.8 cm (18 3/8 x 21 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1961.262

A detail from the museum

The son of an affluent British businessman, Alfred Sisley was born in Paris and became friendly with fellow students Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille while studying in the studio of Charles Gleyre during the early 1860s.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis B. Williams from The Blair Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Annual Report for 1961.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 49, no. 6 (June 1962): 115–145.
• Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review 1962.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 49, no. 9 (November 1962): 199–227.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.