Alfred Sisley: Impressionist

"The Meadow at Veneux-Nadon" by Alfred Sisley

"The inspiration for most of Sisley's art was the land of the Ile de France, the départment surrounding Paris. He made three trips to England - to the Thames Valley, the Isle of Wight and south Wales - and one visit to Normandy. Apart from these places, a group of villages on the Seine near Versailles west of Paris and another group on the Loing south of Paris near Fontainebleau provided him with the inspiration for some of the finest landscapes produced by the Impressionists.

As a professional painter, Sisley considered himself part of the group who came to be known, after their first group exhibition in Paris in 1874, as 'Impressionists'. He was to take part in four of the great Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 882, only deciding to go it alone in the 1880s, a period of particular hardship and difficulty for him.

During his life, Sisley never attracted the admiration or even the interest of critics in the way painters like Monet, Renoir and Degas did, perhaps because, compared with them, his style was restrained and quiet, his subject matter limited. It took other artists to see his worth, like Manet's brother, Eugène Manet, who said of Sisley's 27 pictures in the 1882 Impressionist Exhibition that they were 'the most complete and show great progress. He has a lake or canal bordered by trees which is an authentic masterpiece'. Of another painting exhibited by Sisley's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel later that year in Copenhagen, a critic noted that it was 'so delicately light and shimmery, so harmonious in composition, that one could find no fault in it. Here is no attempt to paint anything which could not be made out by the naked eye. The painting achieves its effect by means of airy lightness and unique beauty.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Works of Sisley" by Janice Anderson.)