Alfred Sisley.

 

 

 

Introduction Of the artists who exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, it was Alfred Sisley who was the purest landscape painter. In an oeuvre of almost 900 oil paintings he produced less than a dozen still lifes and only one or two genre scenes. All of his remaining works are landscapes, and throughout his career he favored the same kind of environment whether in the forest of Fontainebleau, in Louveciennes, London, Moret, or Wales. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sisley Catalog 1. The Saint-Martin canal in Paris in 1870 50x62cm 2. Aqueduct in Port-Mali 1874 54.3x81.3cm 3. Village in Hellenkafe 1874 47x62cm 4. Alley near small town 1866 45x59.5cm 5. Boats in Buzhevale 1873 46x65cm 6. Bridge at Arzhanteye 1872 7. Bridge at Hampton, Kurt. 1874 46x61cm 8. Bridge at the sea-sur-Loing summer of 1888 55x73cm 9. Luan near the sea in 1888 50x73cm 10. The Seine at Buzhevalem 1872 50.8x63.5cm 11. The Seine at Buzhevalem 1876 45x61cm 12. The Seine at Syurezne 1879 50x65cm 13. Ricks 1895 60x73cm 14. Laundresses 1888 36x43cm 15. Village on the banks of the Seine in 1872 59.2x80cm 16. Village at Vuazane 1874 38x46.5cm 17. Village street in Marlote 1866 50x92cm 18. Early Snow at Louveciennes. 1870 54x73cm 19. River landscape. 1890 39x55.5cm 20. River bank. 1890 28.5x40cm 21. Wheat field on a hill in Arzhanteye 1873 50x73cm 22. Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La Celle-Saint-Cloud 1865 50x65cm 23. Church 1893 65x81cm 24. Evening in Normandy. The way to the water. 1894 81x100cm 25. Orchard in the spring 1881 54x72cm 26. Regatta at Molesi. 1874 66x91.5cm 27. Seine at Port Marly 1875 54x65.7cm 28. Seine at Saint-Mumm 1884 50x65cm 29. Bridge at Arzhanteye 1872 38x60cm 30. Still life with Grapes and Nuts 1880 38x55.5cm 31. Thames at Hampton, Kurt 1874 38x55.4cm 32. Flood at Pont-Marley 1876 60x80cm 33. Fog on seaside 1887 46x61cm 34. Old ferry`s way to Bee 1880 45x61cm 35. Geese 1897 21.2x32cm Story His works tend to be calm with little attention paid to cityscapes or recent industrialization. They are often devoid of people, any figures or staffage in them being used as compositional devices or perhaps narrative elements rather than as a means of representing a humanized landscape. Beginning in 1862 he studied at the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Frederic Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together they would paint landscapes en plein air rather than in the studio, in order to realistically capture the transient effects of sunlight. This approach, innovative at the time, resulted in paintings more colorful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work. Their works were usually rejected by the jury of the most important art exhibition in France, the annual Salon. During the 1860s, though, Sisley was in a better position than some of his fellow artists, for he received an allowance from his father. In 1866 Sisley began a relationship with Eugenie Lesouezec (1834–1898; also known as Marie Lescouezec), a Breton living in Paris. The couple produced two children: son Pierre (born 1867) and daughter Jeanne (1869).At the time, Sisley lived not far from Avenue de Clichy and the Cafe Guerbois, the gathering place of many Parisian painters. In 1868 his paintings were accepted at the Salon, but the exhibition did not bring him any financial or critical success, and neither did any of the subsequent exhibitions. The Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, and as a result, Sisley's father's business failed. The painter's sole means of support became the sale of his works. For the remainder of his life, he would live in poverty, for his paintings only rose significantly in monetary value after his death.Occasionally, however, Sisley would be backed up by his patrons: this allowed him, among other things, to make a few brief trips to England. The first of these occurred in 1874 after the first independent Impressionist exhibition. The result of a few months spent near London was a series of nearly twenty paintings of the Upper Thames near Molesey, which was later described by art historian Kenneth Clark as "a perfect moment of Impressionism." Until 1880, Sisley lived and worked in the countryside west of Paris; then Sisley and his family moved to a small village near Moret-sur-Loing, close to the forest of Fontainebleau where the painters of the Barbizon school had worked earlier in the century. Here, as art historian Anne Poulet has said, "the gentle landscapes with their constantly changing atmosphere were perfectly attuned to his talents. Unlike Monet, he never sought the drama of the rampaging ocean or the brilliantly colored scenery of the Cote d'Azur." www.biography.com