Sisley was born in Paris to expatriate British parents; he lived in France almost his entire life. In his 20s he began painting landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau, where an earlier generation of French artists — Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, and the other members of the Barbizon school — began to imbue landscape painting with greater subjectivity. An undistinguished early genre picture, from 1865-66, sees Sisley follow Corot’s example in depicting flowering trees as a curtain of specked pigment.

Most of Sisley’s early work is gone. His house in the Paris suburbs was occupied by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War, and in a letter to a friend he said he lost everything he owned. As a Briton, Sisley didn’t fight, but we know he went to Paris, and he surely would have had contact with fellow artists, fighting for the doomed French Army. (The most famous art-world casualty was Sisley’s friend Frédéric Bazille — a retrospective of whom is at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington this April.) When the war ended, Sisley returned to Île-de-France, where he grew interested in depicting the suburbs with the sensitivity once reserved for the countryside. A painting of the port in Marly, flooded after the Seine burst its banks, unifies sky, water and a cafe into an allover undulation of pigment. Only rarely do his landscapes disclose the transformations that the Industrial Revolution was wreaking. On a trip to London, Sisley ventured out of town and visited Hampton Court, where he painted a newfangled bridge from below, its cast-iron struts framing a Thames of blue and white blotches.

The palette in these postwar paintings is a uniform one of blue, gray, white and green. He becomes a bit more experimental with his colors in the 1880s, and brush strokes get slightly freer, as well: Trees are stippled with a perpendicular brush rather than merely smeared horizontally. I don’t want to overstate any break in style, though. As the Post Impressionists were preparing their emotional onslaught, Sisley stuck with what he knew, even if there was slightly more gesture in the riverside grasses and snowy skies he painted toward the end of his life. One of his final paintings, done on a beach in Wales during stormy weather in 1897, has sand of mauve breached by white waves, and almost recalls the chromatic experiments of Edvard Munch.

This exhibition, curated by the Sisley scholar MaryAnne Stevens, plots Sisley’s art not only through time but through the Île-de-France region, which Sisley shuttled across as his interests changed and his money woes deepened. If your view of modern French painting inclines to only Paris and Provence, this show will introduce you to a new peri-urban geography of places physically on the cusp of the French capital but socially far removed. Argenteuil, Sèvres, Saint-Cloud, Villeneuve-la-Garenne: those suburbs Sisley painted are places that contemporary Parisians now see from the scratched windows of the R.E.R. express trains, and while some remain fancy bourgeois commuter towns, others are now ringed by tower blocks. Remembering that these towns are not eternally bucolic may help contemporary viewers find greater relevance in Sisley’s serene prospects. The landscape is never just the landscape; society is written across it too.