Back to Mauserts and Alfred Sisley

In the morning, I went back to Mauserts Pond at Clarksburg State Park.  What a magnificent place this is, especially for a landscape painter.  A beautiful pond, trees, mountains in the distance, big sky, and virtually no people.

I've been reading a lot about Alfred Sisley lately.  He is, I think, an underrated painter, mainly because we, today, look at his paintings through all the years and imitators that separate us from his time.  Who else was painting like Sisley back in 1872?  Monet, Pissarro, possibly Berthe Morisot and Renoir, and... Sisley was the only Impressionist who insisted on painting outdoors all-the-time.

I learned that he suffered a similar fate as Pissarro from the Franco-Prussian War.  Pissarro lost most of his paintings from the decade of the 1860s when the Prussians occupied his studio.  The same thing happened to Sisley, whose studio in Bougival was destroyed.  That's why there are few paintings by Sisley to be seen prior to 1870-71.