Alfred Sisley: Landscapes

"Landscape at Louveciennes" by Alfred Sisley

"Alfred Sisley's earliest surviving paintings, dating from 1865, were quite heavily painted and tightly observed, in an academic kind of way. There were many still lifes among them, a form he was virtually to abandon in favour of landscape. For Sisley, landscape painting very quickly came to be the cornerstone of his art.

Much influenced in his early paintings by the work of Courbet, Daubigny and Corot - when he first exhibited at the Salon in 1867, he did so as a pupil of Corot - Sisley soon found himself much more interested in the ideas being pursued by the young artists he talked with in the café of Paris' artistic quarters: painting in the open air, reproducing the true light and shade in a subject, using colours as purely as possible.

In the 1860s, Sisley was able to pursue the life of an artist in an easy, untroubled way. In 1868 he married Marie Eugénie Lescouezec, and Renoir painted a delightful study of the handsome young couple. But the Franco-Prussian War [19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871] changed Sisley's life forever. His father's business failed, he went bankrupt and died shortly afterwards. For the rest of his life, Sisley would be chronically short of money, never able to buy a house for his family and always having to move from one cheap rented house to another, sometimes not even able to afford canvases to paint on. He never seemed though to have considered giving up painting. On the contrary, it would always be his only source of income."

To be continued

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