The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes between town and country is a social document by the French Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. A worker draws a cart after him, symbolizing rural life. Preceding him, perhaps rushing ahead, is a bourgeois gentleman in a top hat.
Sisley regularly painted Roads, bridges, and Waterways. The image shows a road with two men on it. One man is a laborer pushing a cart and the other is dressed in a black suit and top hat. The two men seem to be going in opposite directions. The rich man is assumed to be going to the city of Versailles and the laborer is going to the small country town of Louveciennes.
This picture evokes a contrast between country life and urban society. This contrast eludes to the rapid urbanization of Paris during the 1870s with the rural people being left in the dust.
Sisley was dedicated to making landscape paintings using the en Plein air technique along with Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet.
Alfred Sisley’s The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.