SISLEY, Alfred

Sisley’s work around 1870 showed his interest in the colour impressions of trees and buildings and particularly in the shifting play of light and cloud on a landscape.

Till 1877 Sisley lived at Marly, where on one occasion flooding provided him with unusual and appealing subject matter.

Working from a boat during a catastrophic flood in the spring of 1876, Sisley painted the corner of a wine merchant’s house in the small town of Port-Marly on the banks of the Seine. Sisley’s portrayal of the sky is comparable with those of the great Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century (Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael, Jacob van Ruisdael). Equally influential were the works of the English painters Constable and Turner, with which he had become familiar in London.

The pictures Sisley painted are Impressionism of an outstanding order, yet from the connoisseurs’ point of view he was never more than a member of the movement who painted like Monet. The fact is that Sisley conveys no sense of an artistic personality. His range of subjects is not great: he painted landscapes only, with an occasional figure. His art in total lacks subjects, techniques or qualities peculiarly his. Yet Sisley’s paintings are things of beauty and light, done with ease, the expression of a positive spirit. His unspectacular landscape work alternates between distant and closer views, like the intimate landscapes of the Barbizon school.

Sisley went tirelessly in search of motifs along the Seine and its tributaries, he looked no further. He abided by views of village streets, or of interesting groups of buildings, he would be drawn to an old stone bridge, the kind of subject that had fascinated painters since Corot. In unprepossessing patches of gardens or meadows, landscapes on the skirts of towns or along river banks, he could often discover the most arresting colour or light effects.

Sisley painted the waters of the Seine at Bougival or Marly as sensitively as the nuances of snow colour in Pissarro’s beloved lanes and gardens of Louveciennes.

Many of Sisley’s works appear to be typical examples of Impressionism, and this snow-covered landscape, which dates from his most successful period, is no exception. In his treatment of the mother-of-pearl tones of the snow, the artist truly mastered the evocation of the imponderable and the transitory. The painting is one of the most poetic renderings of the fragile and ephemeral world of snow.

Sisley was a British-French landscape painter. Born in Paris to English parents, he began painting as an amateur. His early style was much influenced by Camille Corot. He became associated with Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and with them became one of the founders of Impressionism. His works, mostly landscapes, are distinguished from those of his colleagues by their softly harmonious values. His family was ruined by the Franco-Prussian War, and his life was a constant struggle against poverty. Not until after his death did his talent begin to be widely recognized.

This painting reflects the artist’s mature period of the 1870s, when he created his lightest, most luminous and lyrical paintings.

Sisley went tirelessly in search of motifs along the Seine and its tributaries, he looked no further. He abided by views of village streets, or of interesting groups of buildings, he would be drawn to an old stone bridge, the kind of subject that had fascinated painters since Corot. In unprepossessing patches of gardens or meadows, landscapes on the skirts of towns or along river banks, he could often discover the most arresting colour or light effects.

Sisley’s motifs and view of Nature placed him too plainly as an emulator of Monet, and he had no material distinctly his own that could have asserted his own individuality. This became most apparent when in 1893-94, parallel to Monet’s Rouen cathedral series, he painted about 15 views of the church at Moret. Like all Sisley’s later works, they are firmly painted, and evidently aim to give a rather ordinary sense of the appearance of the building instead of the veils of light and colour impressions Monet registered when looking at his cathedral. Sisley’s work focussed on the thing seen, but art was evolving towards a more subjective emphasis on configurations of colours and shapes. Monet’s cathedrals were already fetching 15,000 francs at that time, while in 1896, when one of Sisley’s church views was resold, it was for a mere 305 francs.

Sisley’s work around 1870 showed his interest in the colour impressions of trees and buildings and particularly in the shifting play of light and cloud on a landscape.

In this painting the outline, as used to define the form of an object, is avoided. The material quality is dissolved; nature becomes merely an illusion. The colours of the spectrum define the colour palette; black, for example, is hardly ever used.

Almost without striving for the effects of airiness, transience, and translucency made fashionable by the Impressionists, without concerning himself about a specific subject, Sisley juxtaposes dense, resonant colours. In so doing, he constructs a bridge to the decorativeness of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.

Sisley’s work around 1870 showed his interest in the colour impressions of trees and buildings and particularly in the shifting play of light and cloud on a landscape. He painted the waters of the Seine at Bougival or Marly as sensitively as the nuances of snow colour in Pissarro’s beloved lanes and gardens of Louveciennes.

The watering place at Marly was constructed during the seventeenth century as part of a large hydraulic system that supplied water to the fountains and pools at the Château de Marly, Louis XIV’s country retreat. As part of the king’s royal complex, it belonged to the same system as the Marly aqueduct and the Machine the Marly, both of which, like the watering place, Sisley painted on several occasions. By the mid-nineteenth century the château and its environs served as mere remnants of courtly life enjoyed more than one hundred years earlier. The buildings and the grounds had been destroyed during the revolution, and by the time of Sisley’s arrival, the reservoir of the once-glamorous château functioned as an area in which to wash clothes and a pond from which horses might drink.

Sisley lived in Marly-le-Roi, west of Paris, from 1875-77. There he painted numerous pictures of the elegant watering-place, one of the few remains of Louis XIV’s summer palace, which was destroyed in 1793.

Having painted the views of the regions outside Paris such as Argenteuil, Marly, Louveciennes and Bougival in the 1870’s, Sisley in the 1880’s moved southward to landscapes around Moret-sur-Loing, south of the Forest of Fontainebleau.

In this painting, created two years before the first Impressionist exhibition, light already reigns supreme. It floods the background in defiance of the traditions of aerial perspective, while the bank closer to the viewer is shrouded in shadow.