MURA · THE COLLECTION · ALFRED SISLEY

Watering Place at Marly

Watering Place at Marly is an oil painting by Alfred Sisley from 1875, the year he moved to the village of Marly-le-Roi west of Paris. It shows the old pool, or abreuvoir, beside his home, under a wide sky. It measures 39.5 by 56.2 cm and hangs in Gallery 201 of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alfred Sisley · 1875 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum explains that Sisley's house on the rue de l'Abreuvoir stood beside the pool, or watering place, seen at the left of the canvas. The pool was all that remained of the water gardens of the park that King Louis XIV had laid out around his country retreat at Marly in the 1600s; the Château de Marly itself was destroyed after the Revolution. The catalogue entry describes a broad, bright sky opening above a riverside town and a sunlit stretch of bank.

How it was painted

Sisley was born in Paris in 1839 to British expatriate parents. Considered the most consistent of the Impressionists in painting outdoors, he produced almost nothing but landscapes, and spent most of his life, as the museum puts it, painting in the villages along the Seine in the region called the cradle of Impressionism. He settled at Marly-le-Roi in 1875, and the floods there that year gave him one of his best-known series. Marly-le-Roi lies about eighteen kilometres from the centre of Paris, in the Yvelines. Sisley died in 1899.

Where it went

The painting belonged to Louis Flornoy in Paris, at whose sale at the Hôtel Drouot in April 1905 it was bought for 5,350 francs by the dealer Camentron. It later passed through Paul Rosenberg and Co. in Paris and New York and a collector named Ziegler, and possibly Wildenstein and Co. in New York, who valued it in 1971. Mrs. Clive Runnells of Lake Forest, Illinois, owned it by 1971 and gave it to the Art Institute that December. It has been lent to A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape in Los Angeles, Chicago and Paris in 1984–85, to The Impressionist Tradition in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Kyoto in 1985–86, and to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in 2008. It is illustrated in the National Gallery's study Art in the Making: Impressionism.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Coast and Countryside collection with a luminous mood: a bright sky over a riverside town.