Claude Monet had first visited London as he sought refuge from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, when he painted one of the early impressions of the River Thames in mist, shown in yesterday’s article. He was to return just before the end of the century, when his fortunes had changed and he could afford to travel in search of motifs. Where better than the River Thames for the optical effects of mist, fog and smog?

Monet had started painting formal series during the 1880s, when he was enjoying commercial success at last. From about 1896, almost all his works were part of a series. He started travelling through Europe in search of suitable motifs for these, visiting Norway in 1895, and later Venice. When he returned to London in 1899, and in the following two years, Monet chose a different view of the Palace of Westminster, from a location at the opposite end of Westminster Bridge, for his series of 19 paintings. These were all started from the second floor of the Administrative Block at the northern end of the old Saint Thomas’s Hospital on the ‘south’ bank, and completed over the following three or four years.

His The Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (1903) is more radical than his painting of thirty years earlier, showing little more than the Palace in silhouette, the sun low in the sky, and its broken reflections in the water.

The Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903) shows the same view in better visibility, but with the sun setting and a small boat on the move in front of the Palace.

Monet’s Waterloo Bridge from 1903 is the ultimate conclusion of his paintings of fog, in which only the softest of forms resolve in its pale purple and blue vagueness, his common destination with the paintings of Turner over fifty years earlier.

In The Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky (1904) the sun is higher and further to the south, allowing Monet to balance the silhouette of the Palace with its shadow cast on the water, and the brightness in the sky with its fragmented reflections.

Henri Le Sidaner also visited Britain on several occasions, and in 1906-07 painted this view of St. Paul’s from the River: Morning Sun in Winter, which may have been inspired by Monet’s series paintings of Rouen Cathedral, here expressed using his own distinctive marks.

Emile Claus’s Sunset over Waterloo Bridge (1916) was painted from a location on the north bank of the Thames slightly to the east of Waterloo Bridge, the north end of which is prominent, and looks south-west into the setting sun, up river. Claus painted several views of Waterloo Bridge while he was in London, but doesn’t appear to have attempted any formal series, such as Monet’s.

Claus isn’t formulaic in his treatment. He uses billowing clouds of steam and smoke to great effect, and his inclusion of the road, trees and terraces in the foreground, on the Embankment, provides useful contrast with the crisp arches of the bridge, and the vaguer silhouettes in the distance. Like Monet’s series, this was probably painted from a temporary studio inside a building.

Claus’s Morning Reflection on the Thames in London, from 1918, is a view over the Embankment and river that’s desaturated and made vaguer by fog.

My last example is another view over the River Thames, this time by Lesser Ury. London in Fog from 1926 doesn’t appear to be a nocturne, but looks at the effects of fog on both lights and their reflections.

On 4 December 1952, a high pressure system settled over London. The wind fell away, and fog and smoke were trapped under a temperature inversion. The following day the whole of the city and an area totalling over one thousand square miles were blanketed in smog that remained until 9 December. It’s estimated that directly caused over ten thousand deaths. A succession of laws and a major campaign to eliminate open coal fires in London resulted in great improvement, although a decade later there was another lesser smog, perhaps the event I remember from my childhood. The beauty of those paintings can also be deadly.

One of the enduring memories of my childhood, spent partly in London, is walking in smog, then commonly known as a pea-souper. The combination of dense fog and smoke was so thick I could barely make out street lights, and the streets were for once almost empty, as vehicles could only proceed at walking pace.

This weekend I present a selection of paintings of mist, fog and maybe even a touch of smog on the River Thames, in and near London. Today’s paintings come from the pioneers of the nineteenth century, and tomorrow’s from the twentieth.

Many of JMW Turner’s greatest paintings take advantage of the optical effects of mist and fog. Being a Londoner, he must have experienced these all too frequently.

These peaked in Turner’s famous painting of a Great Western Railway train crossing the River Thames at Maidenhead: Rain, Steam, and Speed, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844. The whole image is fogbound and vague, and proved a precursor to the approach of the Impressionists after his death.

Less than thirty years later, when he was taking refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster (1871) is less Impressionist. Painted from the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, near what is now Whitehall, the three towers to the south are almost superimposed, and aerial perspective is exaggerated by the mist. The river is bustling with small paddleboat steamers. In the foreground a pier under construction is shown almost in silhouette. Small waves and reflections on the river are indicated with coarse brushstrokes, suggesting this is a rapid and spontaneous work.

A decade later, The Houses of Parliament is Winslow Homer’s faithful representation of the Palace of Westminster when viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, to the north (downstream) of the end of Westminster Bridge. The tide is high under the arches of Westminster Bridge, and small boats are on the river. This classic watercolour makes an interesting contrast with Monet’s later oil paintings I show tomorrow: Homer provides little more detail, the Palace being shown largely in silhouette, but works with the texture of the paper and careful choice of pigment to add granularity. He provides just sufficient visual cues to fine detail, in the lamps and people on Westminster Bridge, and in the boats, to make this a masterly watercolour.

The following year, Jules Bastien-Lepage paid a return visit to the city, when he painted The Thames, London. This view of industrial docklands further downstream maintains detail into the far distance, except where it’s affected by the smoky and hazy atmosphere typical of the city at that time. It was this section of the river that was also painted on several occasions by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Tom Roberts’ Fog, Thames Embankment (1884) is painted from a similar location to Monet’s The Thames below Westminster above, on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, but is cropped more tightly, cutting off the tops of the Victoria and Elizabeth Towers. The Palace and first couple of arches of Westminster Bridge appear in misty silhouette, with moored barges and buildings on a pier shown closer and crisper. He renders the ruffled surface of the river with coarse brushstrokes, different from those of Monet.

Among six paintings that Camille Pissarro started work on during his visit to England in 1890 was this view of Charing Cross Bridge, London from Waterloo Bridge. For this he made a sketch in front of the motif, then following his return to his studio in Éragny he painted this in oils. This looks south-west, towards a skyline broken by the Palace of Westminster and the familiar tower of Big Ben.

In Frederick Childe Hassam’s Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898), the sun has already set, and he is viewing the Palace in the gathering dusk from a point on the opposite (‘south’) bank, perhaps not as far south as Lambeth Palace. The Victoria Tower is prominent in the left of the painting, the Central Tower is in the centre, and the most distant Elizabeth Tower is distinctive with its illuminated clock face. Moored boats in the foreground provide the only other detail. His rough facture gives a textured surface to the water.

While artists from around the world had gathered in the colony at Grez-sur-Loing, little more than 12 km (7 miles) downstream, French Impressionism was flourishing at Moret-sur-Loing. Alfred Sisley and his family moved there in 1880, and this was to be the centre of his painting for most of the rest of his life. Their first house there was in Veneux-Nadon (now Veneux-Les Sablons), on the road to the village of By.

Moret had good rail connections with central Paris, although in 1881 Sisley wrote that the journey took two hours, sufficiently long for him to excuse himself from visiting the city. He lived there in quiet isolation with his family; a few visitors including Berthe Morisot and Stéphane Mallarmé made their way out to see him. But the nineteen years that he lived in or near Moret were highly productive, with a total of 550 oil paintings, several sketchbooks, and a few pastels.

Sisley experimented with his facture and style at this time. On the Hills of Moret in the Spring – Morning from 1880 looks down from one of those low hills towards the town. The brushwork in the foreground is composed of short strokes of near-white and colour, giving the hillside a distinctive texture.

By the end of 1881, the Sisley family had moved into the town of Moret. This was apparently financed in part by a loan from his dealer Durand-Ruel. About a year later, Sisley decided that the air in Moret didn’t suit him, or possibly he needed to keep on the move from his creditors, and the family moved to Les Sablons until 1886.

During Sisley’s time at Moret, he explored the banks of the rivers and canal, producing some of his best-known paintings. The Banks of the Loing towards Moret from 1883 is one his earlier riverside views, showing unusual combinations of reflections of tall trees, working craft and small industry, and distant chalk cliffs.

This view of The Loing Canal from 1884 is another fine example from near Saint-Mammès. This waterway runs parallel to the River Loing, connecting the Briare Canal to the River Seine, and is one of the series of waterways joining Paris to Lyon known as the Bourbonnais Route. These were constructed in the early eighteenth century, and still carry barges of grain from the farms in central France.

As with many of his waterside paintings, much of the canvas is occupied by the sky, which Sisley wrote that he always painted first so as to set the scene and mood for the whole painting.

Although Sisley, unlike Monet and Pissarro, painted few formal series, some of his motifs group together. The Canal du Loing, here seen in 1885, is in one of those groups. These typically have a low horizon, and reiterate his emphasis on the sky setting the mood and tone of his paintings. Below that, the water shimmers with the reflected buildings and relatively coarse brushstrokes rather than the more staccato style seen developing in Pissarro’s landscapes of this time.

Another group is exemplified by Moret – The Banks of the River Loing, probably painted in the autumn/fall of 1885, with its slightly coarser marks and strong colour contrasts. These bring the foreground closer, and push the background deep.

Sisley also recognised the visual potential of the town of Moret and its bridge, a motif that was to dominate his later work. The Bridge at Moret, Storm Effect from 1887 is an early plein air sketch capturing the approach of a storm, with the sky remaining bright for the moment, but the gathering wind already driving up small waves on the River Loing.

Sisley seems to have started another group showing the avenue of poplars at Moret-sur-Loing in 1888.

In 1892 he painted this barren winter landscape of The Canal du Loing at Moret, with its pale stand of poplars beating their rhythm across the canvas before curving into the distance.

In Moret Bridge in the Sunlight from the same year, Sisley settles on an angle of view over the town that was to prove his favourite, capturing the main spans of the bridge, the Porte de Bourgogne and the town’s Gothic church beyond.

Sisley’s most formal and conscious attempt at series painting is that of the Church at Moret-sur-Loing, a tight series with two branches consisting of fourteen paintings, completed in 1893-94, when Monet was reworking his Rouen series in the studio.

Sisley’s emphasis in this series is shown well in The Church at Moret, Evening, from 1894, and is quite different from Monet’s. As MaryAnne Stevens puts it, “Monet painted the air that lay between his eye and the façade”, while “Sisley focused on the physical mass of the structure, using different light conditions to accentuate his subject’s architectonic quality.”

Sisley remained in Moret, painting in poverty and isolation, until 1897, when he and his longstanding partner Eugénie visited South Wales and married at long last in Cardiff Town Hall. They arrived back in Moret-sur-Loing on 1 October 1897. On 8 October the following year, Eugénie Sisley died at Moret. By then, Alfred had developed his terminal illness, cancer of the throat, and was gravely ill himself. He died at Moret-sur-Loing on 29 January 1899, shortly before Asai Chū arrived in Grez-sur-Loing.

One of the small villages on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau grew into an artist’s colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Grez-sur-Loing is on the bend of the River Loing where it turns to the east to head for Moret-sur-Loing and empty into the River Seine at Saint-Mammès. The village lies between the road north from Nemours to Fontainebleau, and the river meandering in its floodplain.

Among those who painted there are John Singer Sargent, Carl Larsson who met his wife there, Bruno Liljefors the Swedish animal painter, PS Krøyer and other Nordic Impressionists of the Skagen group, Theodore Robinson and Willard Metcalf from the US, and the Glasgow Boys.

Like many others, the British artist Louis Welden Hawkins came to Grez from Paris, in his case by about 1880. He painted rural scenes in a style strongly reminiscent of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was only slightly older than Hawkins, and at the time making a great impression at the Salon. This is Hawkins’ Peasant Woman from about 1880.

Hawkins’ first success came with Orphans (1881), which shares Bastien-Lepage’s muted colours, attributed to the light supposedly peculiar to Grez. A young brother and sister are in a neglected graveyard, looking together at a pauper’s grave, apparently of one or both of their parents. This painting was awarded a third-class medal at the Salon that year, and marked the start of a run of his paintings exhibited at the following three Salons. It was purchased by the state in 1887 for 10,000 francs, and was also exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.

Hawkins continued this style in The Last Step (c 1882), showing an elderly woman walking slowly with a stick in what may be the same graveyard. In the distance, a gravedigger is digging a new grave through the stony soil. The two engage in conversation, probably discussing where she will be buried in the not too distant future.

By 1882, the colony at Grez was becoming popular with Nordic painters who were developing their skills in France. Among them were the Swedish artists Carl Larsson and Karin Bergöö, who met there and later married.

Larsson’s paintings from Grez also appear to have been influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage. His watercolour of The Old Man and the Nursery Garden from 1883 shows similar muted colours, and common rural themes.

Larsson painted this touching portrait of The Bride at Grez the same year. It almost certainly shows his wife Karin, and was presumably intended as a wedding gift to her.

In the Country (1883) is typical of a number of views that Larsson painted of the rural poor in and around Grez, in the same realist style with soft colours. That year, he had his first painting accepted by the Paris Salon, and was getting valuable commissions for book illustrations.

The single figure in Larsson’s watercolour Autumn (1884) is dressed anachronistically in clothing from the previous century. This was most probably to please the Salon jury, as eighteenth century scenes were fashionable at the time. Its setting at Grez and his soft realism combine to make this one of his finest watercolours of this period.

Well before the Glasgow Boys came, John Lavery visited from Glasgow. Although he was born in Belfast, he moved to Glasgow when he was a child. After initially attending the Haldane Academy in Glasgow, he went to Paris in the early 1880s, where he was a student at the Académie Julian, where he was influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and Millet, and painted at Grez-sur-Loing in 1884.

Lavery’s plein air oil sketch of The Principal Street at Grez from 1884 shows one of the many artists at work in the village, which had become popular internationally. Although following the course recommended for Naturalist painters, Lavery’s style is here thoroughly Impressionist.

At its height, Grez drew artists from all over the world, including some of the pioneers from Japan. In 1889 Asai Chū founded the first group of western-style (yōga) painters in Japan, and in 1898 was appointed professor of the forerunner of the Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1900 he moved to Paris for two years of study of Impressionism, and went to Grez to paint en plein air.

His Washing Place in Grez-sur-Loing shows small huts used by the village women to wash laundry in 1901.

The following year he painted this Bridge in Grez-sur-Loing before returning to Japan.

For much of that time, just over 12 km (7 miles) downstream, one of the great landscape artists of French Impressionism had been painting alone.

Following their return to the outskirts of Paris after the Franco-Prussian war and Paris Commune, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir had painted in and around the Monets’ home in Argenteuil on the north bank of the River Seine. Monet commuted into the city by train, the Sisleys shared their house, and Renoir visited in the summer.

Édouard Manet was another visitor, and painted this oil sketch of Claude Monet in Argenteuil in 1874, showing Monet working in his floating studio. His position in the boat appears relaxed, but would have become uncomfortable if maintained for long, as he would have had to keep bending forward to paint, suggesting he might have posed for this painting.

In 1876, Monet’s wife Camille became seriously ill, deteriorating further with the birth of their second son in 1878. The family moved to share a house with his patron Ernest Hoschedé in Vétheuil, further out to the north-west. The Sisleys moved to Moret-sur-Loing on the opposite side of Paris, leaving only Renoir to continue his summer visits.

Renoir’s The Boating Party at Chatou (1879) shows watersports taking place further down the river, with a combination of social rowing in the foreground, and two sports rowers further out in the river.

Renoir’s By the Water from about 1880 is believed to have been painted on the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise on the Île de Chatou, which he was soon to use for his major work Luncheon of the Boating Party (below). If that’s the case, then what appears to be a lake in the background is really the River Seine.

During the summer of 1880, Renoir started work on another of his masterpieces, that he didn’t complete until the following year: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), with its complex group of figures.

This was again set on the Île de Chatou at the Restaurant Fournaise, and funded by commissioned portraits over this period. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This was exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, where it was praised by several critics.

Later in 1882, Renoir painted The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autumn, close to another bridge over the river for which Monet had a particular affection.

In 1881, Gustave Caillebotte acquired a property at Petit-Gennevilliers, near Argenteuil, where he had a boatyard, and moved there permanently in 1888. He and Renoir maintained the tradition of painting this section of the River Seine.

Caillebotte’s Boat Moored on the Seine at Argenteuil from about 1884 has thoroughly Impressionist style and facture, with its obvious brushstrokes forming the broken reflection of the boat on the water, and even detail through the depth of the painting.

Although Caillebotte didn’t make formal series of views that became such a feature of the art of Monet and Pissarro, in the mid-1880s he painted several views of the modern bridges over the River Seine near Argenteuil. The Bridge at Argenteuil and the Seine (1885) is Impressionist in style, with its broken water surface. This features a steam paddle tug towing a laden barge towards the next bridge, which I think is the railway bridge that Claude Monet painted at least twice.

In 1888, Renoir spent the summer painting at Argenteuil and Bougival, where he rediscovered his landscape form.

Renoir’s The Seine at Argenteuil from 1888 is another view of leisure boating, painted in a style more similar to Sisley’s high Impressionist landscapes, with coarse high chroma brushstrokes laid to form the surface of the water.

For Gustave Caillebotte and his friends, this was the place to come to enjoy a day’s sailing, as shown in his late painting of Sailboats on the Seine at Argenteuil from 1892, just two years before his untimely death at the age of only forty-five. With that, Argenteuil and Chatou were abandoned and Impressionism moved on.

When the French Impressionists reassembled after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, they gathered a little further up river from Louveciennes and Bougival, at the small town of Argenteuil on the north bank of the River Seine. At the time it was just on the outer edge of the north-western suburbs of the city, about 12 km (7.6 miles) from the centre, and was only fifteen minutes by train to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Claude Monet was able to commute into the metropolis, and the Sisleys moved in with the Monets in 1872. This weekend I show a small selection of the best-known paintings that were made in and around Argenteuil, and particularly at Chatou, down river.

Although Monet was barely making a living from his art at this time, he was among the few who could afford to use cadmium yellow, which has been found in his painting of The Artist’s House at Argenteuil from 1873.

This marked the start of a highly productive period for Alfred Sisley, and, in conjunction with Monet and Renoir, changed his art. The three concentrated their efforts on the recording of transient effects of light using colour, removing black from their palettes, and abandoning the traditional ‘finish’ of their paintings.

Sisley’s Footbridge at Argenteuil from 1872 is dominated by the perspective projection of the bridge itself, almost to the exclusion of the river below. His figures are gestural but look natural in their forms.

The Impressionists occasionally painted themselves at work, particularly during the earlier years of the movement. Above is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Monet Painting in his Garden in Argenteuil from 1873. He is using a conventional lightweight wooden easel, with a small canvas allowing him to work standing, with his oil paints in the pochade box under the easel.

Monet’s The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873) is one of his several landscapes centred on the railway from the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War. The following year, he painted the same bridge, as seen below in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1874).

Monet’s commute ended at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where in 1877 he obtained permission to paint a series of works showing the station. By the third Impressionist Exhibition of April of that year, Monet had assembled seven views of the station, including one that even seemed to please the critics. Among the paintings from that campaign is his Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

One of the products of Renoir’s painting with Monet was this highly chromatic view of The Duck Pond (1873) at a farm near Argenteuil.

The following summer, Renoir visited Argenteuil again, to paint in the company of both Monet and Manet. The Seine at Chatou (1874) is one of his more vigorously crafted works, with a water surface similar to those being painted at the time by Sisley.

Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

With the Paris Commune crushed in 1871, and order being restored to France under the new Republic, the Pissarros returned to live a more settled life in Louveciennes again, after the shock of discovering that most of his 1500 or so paintings had been damaged or destroyed by occupying Prussian soldiers. There Pissarro lived close to Alfred Sisley, and the two often painted in company. Renoir’s mother also lived in the village, enabling the three painters to meet frequently.

Among Pissarro’s favourite motifs in this post-war period were numerous views of the Route de Saint-Germain and other roads around Louveciennes, and the River Seine at Bougival.

Less known are his watercolours, such as this view of Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germain from 1871, and are reminiscent of the paintings of Johan Jongkind.

Pissarro painted this woodland view of an Avenue in the Parc de Marly in the autumn of 1871. It looks towards the village of Marly-le-Roi from the Port du Phare, inside the grounds of the Château de Marly. His skilful use of staffage draws the eye towards the far end of the avenue. The artist seems to have sold this painting quite quickly to an unknown buyer, from whom Durand-Ruel bought it in early 1873.

Alfred Sisley also painted here en plein air, as seen in The Seine at Bougival from 1872. The water surface is mirror-smooth, and Sisley has been careful to paint the reflection of the buildings with optical precision.

This is Pissarro’s wintry scene of The Post-House, the Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Effect of Snow from 1872. This looks from the ‘Royal Gate’ of the Château de Marly towards the post-house, a landmark featured in several of his works from this period. This painting was bought that Spring by Durand-Ruel, who sold it a year later to Jean-Baptiste Faure, the opera singer, Pissarro’s first collector and Sisley’s enduring patron.

Pissarro must have taken delight in the weird forms of the trees in this Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes, painted in 1872. In the far distance is the massive warm cream stone of Marly Aqueduct.

Although the Pissarros were able to live on the money generated by Camille’s painting, they must have got by in relative poverty. However, in 1872, he sold four stretched canvas overdoor panels depicting the seasons to the banker Achille Arosa for 100 Francs each. Pissarro tried to buy them back when they came up for auction in 1891, but despite appealing to Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, they were sold for just over a thousand Francs to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, and have remained in private collections since.

In April 1872, the Pissarros moved from Louveciennes to Pontoise, where they rented a house and Camille established his studio.

Sisley wasn’t as prolific as Pissarro in either ‘road’ or snow scenes. His Snow on the Road, Louveciennes (1874) clearly comes from the same school, but his trees and buildings remain distinctive.

Sisley’s Aqueduct at Marly (1874) shows the massive form of this aqueduct which appeared in the distance in Pissarro’s Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes above. This and the nearby Machine de Marly, which Sisley also painted, were part of a monumental hydraulic network built in the 1680s for Louis XIV, to supply water to the Château de Marly and the royal gardens of the Palace at Versailles. The stone tower at the right end of the aqueduct is the Tour de Levant, used by Prussian troops as a vantage point for observing the besieged city of Paris, a point that won’t have escaped Sisley’s attention.

Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875 shows the village blacksmiths at work.

In 1876, Félicien Rops must have visited one of the popular bathing resorts nearby, to paint his Sunday in Bougival. This shows a lecherous old man watching two young women preparing to bathe there, a mere 15 km (10 miles) from the heart of Paris.

By this time, the Impressionists had moved away from Louveciennes, and were painting elsewhere.

Although Sisley was now living near Sèvres, he must have returned in about 1879 for one last painting in front of the motif, on The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes. This is an example of his more sketchy plein air paintings from his time at Sèvres, and a more traditional perspective view of a road of the time. This section of the road is close to Louveciennes, on the main route between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At that point, the Impressionists finally left Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to rest in peace.

When the prolific portraitist in pastels Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun retired to live near Paris, she chose a small hamlet to the west of the city, between the palace at Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Louveciennes. She died there in 1842, and is buried in the graveyard not far from her house.

Twenty-seven years later it became the focus for a group of friends, who went on to become the core of the French Impressionists. For the next few years Louveciennes and the adjacent villages of Bougival and Marly-le-Roi were to appear in well over a hundred of their paintings, a few of which I show this weekend.

Just beyond Chatou, the River Seine sweeps to the right in a bend with a series of long islands with popular bathing houses, among them the famous La Grenouillère. In the summer of 1869, Auguste Renoir was living at his parents’ house in Louveciennes, just to the south of this bend, where Camille Pissarro and his family were renting a house. He visited Claude Monet and his family, who were living near Bougival, also on that bend, and they often painted together.

Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited La Grenouillère.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, which is most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown here) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Originally conceived as plein air sketches preparatory to more finished paintings for submission to the Salon the following year, they came to define these brilliant shimmering images formed from high chroma brushstrokes as Impressionist style.

If Impressionism has to have a single moment of birth, it’s surely in the summer of 1869 at La Grenouillère.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère is his early statement of his Impressionist agenda. The pair realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants. This also reveals Monet’s preference for modern pigments, as most of the brighter mid-blues here use cobalt blue, introduced earlier in the nineteenth century.

In addition to Renoir, Pissarro and Monet, Alfred Sisley maintained a studio nearer the river in Bougival, where the four artists painted, starved and fought off despair together.

Pissarro painted a succession of views of the roads around the village. His Road to Versailles at Louveciennes (Snow Effect) (1869) is typical of his earlier ‘road’ paintings, showing an avenue of tall, bare-branched trees, brushed in coarsely.

The following winter his paintings concentrated on road scenes around Louveciennes, a theme which continued for many years, spanning the seasons.

As many artists before him, Pissarro used trees to frame his motifs in repoussouir, but during the late 1860s they started to invade more central areas of the canvas. In about 1869, in his Winter Landscape at Louveciennes for the first time tree trunks and branches spread across his canvas, breaking up the motif behind into small sections.

Pissarro’s Houses at Bougival, Autumn is clearly dated 1870, although by that time he had moved from Louveciennes. It is also thought to have been exhibited at the Salon that year, suggesting it may have been started in late 1869.

Like Pissarro, Sisley started depicting the streets of suburbs, including Early Snow in Louveciennes. This has been dated to 1870, although it appears more likely that it was painted en plein air late the previous year.

Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in September 1870 the Pissarros’ house in Louveciennes was requisitioned by the invading Prussians. The family fled first to their friends in Montfoucault, then in December travelled on to England, where they settled in Norwood, at that time an outer suburb of London. When in England, Pissarro met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his dealer, and Claude Monet, who had also fled to London.

Bougival was also overrun by Prussian soldiers, who commandeered Sisley’s studio; many of his early works were lost, as Pissarro’s were in Louveciennes, just over a mile away. The Sisleys were forced into the city of Paris, and despite Alfred’s British nationality, they remained trapped through the siege of the city into the following year. Worse still, the Sisley family business collapsed and his parents were in no position to support the artist.

By the early 1860s, the large and ancient Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris, had been attracting those of the Barbizon School, who painted realist landscapes in front of the motif. The next generation started visiting in 1865, and went on to form the French Impressionists.

In May 1865, the young Frédéric Bazille left the city of Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he painted Landscape at Chailly (1865) in company with Claude Monet, and possibly Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Although clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, his colours are much brighter, and escape the rather sombre browns and greens that dominated much of the work of that earlier art.

Sisley painted this Avenue of Chestnut Trees in La Celle-Saint-Cloud to the west of the forest in 1865, again in Barbizon style. He didn’t submit it to the Salon until 1867, when it was refused. It then remained unsold for ten years before being bought by Sisley’s patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer.

The following year, Sisley walked through the forest with Renoir. He then stayed in the village of Marlotte, where Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro and Cézanne also visited to paint.

Sisley was more successful with Women Going to the Woods, completed in 1866. This was one of his two paintings exhibited at the Salon that year, and shows the main street in the village of Marlotte with a little rustic staffage.

Clearing in the Woods (1865) is Renoir’s first substantial (surviving) landscape painting, and shows strong influence from Corot. He adopts quite a detailed realist style in this view of a clearing in the midst of massive chestnut trees. These are believed to be near the small village of La Celle-St-Cloud, to the west of Paris not far from Bougival, rather than in the forest. It’s likely that he painted there in the company of Alfred Sisley, who made two views of the same site in very different style.

The following year Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

The following year Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American artist who trained in Paris, painted this wonderful oil sketch of Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (c 1876). This is probably the loosest and most Impressionist painting of his career.

At some time in the late nineteenth century, the wealthy industrialist, amateur painter and patron of Impressionism, Henri Rouart painted In Fontainebleau Forest. This may have been inspired by Corot, but is a realist study in light, shade, and the texture of bark.

John Ferguson Weir was another American painter who had trained in Paris, and became the first director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University. He visited in about 1902, when he painted Forest of Fontainebleau (c 1902), with its tiny solitary figure against the fallen trunk.

In 1867 Théodore Rousseau died in the village of Barbizon, and he was followed in 1875 by Jean-François Millet. By the twentieth century the forest had fallen out of favour with the new generation.

This weekend we’re visiting what used to be a small village on the bank of the River Oise, where several of the French Impressionists developed their skills in painting landscapes en plein air. In yesterday’s first article we had reached 1876, the year of the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

In complete contrast to his few landscapes influenced by Paul Cézanne, in 1876 Pissarro also painted some views of the commercial barges trading on the River Oise, including this of Barges at Pontoise, the only canvas in which the boats dominate his composition. This painting remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death, and wasn’t even exhibited until 1936.

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather is another of Pissarro’s views of the River Oise from 1876.

The Rainbow, Pontoise, which Pissarro painted in 1877, was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that year. It’s a panoramic view of the fields around the neighbouring area of Épluches viewed from Pontoise, with a modest and realistic rainbow.

Around 1877, when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise, the pair of them painted the same motif hidden or revealed by the same trees. Pissarro’s version of Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise, above, is the more famous, and captures texture in everything, from the smoother surface of the track to the smaller branches, and presents an essay on the form and structure of trunks and branches.

Cézanne’s La Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise shows little or no anatomical basis to the construction of his trees, whose branches are only loosely related to foliage. He simplifies throughout, with little or no texture, and more basic shadows, on the trunks, and the foliage is depicted as amorphous areas of leaf colour.

Béliard’s Moulin de Chauffour, Effect of Snow (1878) is another winter scene from the area near Pontoise, and is significantly less painterly than Pissarro or Cézanne.

By 1880, when Pissarro painted this Landscape at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, his work was losing its conventional Impressionist facture, as he adopted smaller, staccato brushstrokes and his style became more ‘pointillist’.

Pissarro also started to transfer his attention from the land to its inhabitants, here the rural poor of these Cottages at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise (1880).

Pissarro’s Peasant Woman Digging, the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) shows two women working in the vegetable garden of this large house in the village. This painting was first shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition the following year.

The Harvest, Pontoise, from 1881, is one of several of Pissarro’s paintings focussing more closely on agricultural activities, and now becoming overtly ‘pointillist’. Because of the brushwork involved, he couldn’t have painted this in front of the motif, and it turns out to be a second copy of an earlier and apparently identical painting.

This increasingly human content, in paintings such as his Peasant Woman and Child Returning from the Fields, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1881, drew comparisons with Millet, from whom Pissarro sought to distance himself in terms of modernity. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel later that year, and shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

Pissarro later concentrated his attention on Éragny, then cityscapes of Paris. Cézanne returned to his family home in Aix-en-Provence, and Béliard became the mayor of Étampes further south. Today Pontoise is part of the ‘new town’ of Cergy-Pontoise, and its population has grown to well over 30,000, within an urban area of nearly a quarter of a million.

This weekend we travel to what used to be a small village of around six thousand on the bank of the River Oise, to the north-west of Paris. Pontoise was the centre of early Impressionist landscape painting in front of the motif, and appears in hundreds of works painted there from the late 1860s. It’s where Camille Pissarro lived and developed his skills, Paul Cézanne learned to paint en plein air, and others including Vincent van Gogh and Charles Daubigny painted.

The country around Pontoise has also been painted extensively. In these two articles, I include some from Auvers-sur-Oise, a little upstream, but exclude those from Ennery to the south, Éragny down river, where Pissarro settled later, and Osny to the north-west, all names you’ll see in the titles of significant Impressionist paintings.

We start in 1867, in the early days of the development of Impressionism, with Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise. This realist view shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived at the time, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise.

The year after he painted these Apple Trees at Pontoise, the House of Père Gallien (1868), the Pissarro family moved to Louveciennes, also to the north-west of Paris, where they intended to settle down in a large rented house. It was here that Pissarro first got to know Alfred Sisley well, when they painted in company, and alongside Monet and Renoir, all four of them starving and fighting off despair from their lack of sales.

The forgotten Impressionist Édouard Béliard may well have painted Boulevard de Fossés in Pontoise alongside Pissarro, Cézanne and Guillaumin in 1872.

Béliard’s Pontoise, View of the Lock (1872-5) was probably among his paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Its composition is reminiscent of Sisley’s The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872, and its style is similar to those of Pissarro and Sisley at that time.

Paul Cézanne started learning to paint en plein air alongside Pissarro’s easel in 1873, when he painted this view of the House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise. As with all beginners, he took a long time getting the painting to look right, so different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart, as reflected in the orientation of the shadows here.

This view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil, slightly up-river from Pontoise.

Of all the paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874, Cézanne’s The Hanged Man’s House, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874) was among the most successful, as he sold it to the collector Count Doria for three hundred francs.

Béliard’s Pothuis Quay in Pontoise, Effect of Snow from 1875 may have been exhibited at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, and is similar in subject and style to the winter scenes painted around Louveciennes by Pissarro and Sisley from 1870 onwards.

In February 1875, with snow still falling, the Pissarros returned to their house in Pontoise, for Camille to paint there again. Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise (1875) strikes a fine balance between an impression captured in haste, and sufficient detail to make it more than just a passing moment.

That year a few of Pissarro’s paintings appear to have been influenced by Cézanne. Perhaps the best example is The Small Bridge, Pontoise, which could easily be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s views in the woods of northern France.

View of the Côte des Gratte-Coqs, Pontoise from the same year is also less distinctively one of Pissarro’s works.

In 1876, Pissarro painted this large view of one of the gardens in Pontoise: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters. In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.