Driving to the Templer home on a snowy night with Templer,  Mona, and Jean,  Nick writes of Mona, “ . . . she jumped out of her side of the car, and ran across the Sisley landscape to the front door, which someone had opened from within.”

Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) was a British painter whom most viewers would identify as a French Impressionist, as indeed he identified himself.  A British citizen, Sisley was born in Paris and spent most of his life in France, painting first rather in the manner of Corot, but gradually coming under the spell of his contemporaries Manet,  Renoir, Monet, and Pisarro.  Sisley exhibited repeatedly with the Impressionist group and always  committed  himself to the goals of plein-air landscape painting and the optical color-mixing effects for which the Impresssions became known.  Evocation of the light on a snowy countryside was a favorite theme of Sisley and his colleagues, and a painting like this one of 1874 might have provided inspiration for Nick’s phrase, “the Sisley landscape.”

Snow on the Road, Louveciennes (Chemin de la Machine)
Sisley, 1874
15 X 22 inches
private collection
photo public domain from Wikipedia