Sisley painted more than 100 pictures of the village of Saint-Mammès, situated at the confluence of the River Loing with the Seine. With just a few quick strokes of paint Sisley suggests a figure, wearing a blue top, standing with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the river. Two other figures stand talking beside a shed. Another figure seems to be working – he is perched on top of various planks of timber. By 1880 the Impressionist painters had reached a crisis as to how their art should develop. Of them all – as this painting from around 1886 shows – it was Sisley who remained true to the Impressionist ideals of recording light, colour and atmosphere and of painting outside directly from the motif. The French critic Adolphe Tavernier, speaking at Sisley's funeral, referred to him as 'a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees – in a word one of the most remarkable landscapists of his day'.