Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) was born in Paris to English parents — his father was a prosperous silk merchant — and spent his formative years in England before returning to France in 1861 to study painting in Charles Gleyre's studio. There he met Monet, Renoir, and Bazille, and the four painted together frequently in the Fontainebleau forest, laying the groundwork for Impressionism. Sisley's early career was eased by his family's wealth, but the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) destroyed his father's business and he spent the rest of his life in poverty, never achieving the commercial success of Monet or Renoir. He participated in four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions and was the purest landscapist among them — he painted almost nothing but landscape for his entire career, returning obsessively to the rivers, canals, and villages of the Île-de-France and later the Loire. Despite his English nationality he applied for French citizenship twice (in 1895 and on his deathbed in 1899) and was refused both times. He died in January 1899 of throat cancer at Moret-sur-Loing, barely known to the public and in severe financial distress. Within months of his death his paintings were selling at auction for prices that would have transformed his life.

Sisley is the most consistent and, in some ways, most purely Impressionist of the group — his subjects never stray from landscape, and his preoccupation with sky, water, and light never wavers. He painted large skies that occupy two-thirds or more of his canvases, and his treatment of clouds in motion, wet or misty atmosphere, and the shimmer of water is exceptional. His touch is looser than Pissarro's and more regular than Monet's — a consistent, horizontal stroke that suggests the parallel recession of land and water. His palette is notably cool — blues, grays, pale greens — with moments of warm sun that feel earned rather than decorative. He was a particular master of the effects of snow, which he painted with greater subtlety and more frequency than any of his contemporaries.

Sisley occupies a clear but secondary place in Impressionist history: the movement's most committed pure landscapist, whose work extended and refined its atmospheric methods without dramatically changing them. His relative obscurity during his lifetime and sudden posthumous appreciation make him a canonical case in the sociology of taste. His sustained attention to the specific qualities of the Île-de-France landscape — its particular light, its flat river valleys, its humid atmosphere — produced a body of work that is both geographically specific and universally atmospheric.