Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley
The Impressionistic landscape painter Alfred Sisley was born on 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) and lived much of his time in France but kept his British citizenship. He was the Impressionism who drew landscapes outside the studio the most frequently (i.e., outdoors). Unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he rarely wandered into figure painting and discovered that Impressionism satisfied his artistic requirements.
A sequence of pictures he completed in 1874 of the River Thames, mainly in the region around Hampton Court, and landscape pictures of locations in or close to Moret-sur-Loing are among his major works. Like many of his landscapes, the beautiful paintings of the Seine and its arches in the former suburbs of Paris are calm and are drawn in soft hues of pink, cream, green, dusty blue, and purple, as are many of his landscapes. The expressional force and color intensity of Sisley's work grew over time.
Life and times
Rich British parents gave birth to Sisley in Paris. His mother, Felicia Sell, was a highly educated music enthusiast, while his father, William Sisley, was employed in the cotton textile industry.
At 18 years old, Alfred Sisley was taken to London in 1857 to explore a career in finance, but he decided to give up after just four years and returned to Paris in 1861. In the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, he studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts in 1862, where he met Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Consequently, they would paint outside rather than in the laboratory to accurately portray the fleeting effects of sunlight. This unusual method produced paintings that were more colorful and extensively drawn than what the audience was used to seeing at the time. Sisley and his friends had limited opportunities to display or promote their art. The judges at the yearly Salon, France's most renowned art show, typically rejected their creations. Sisley, however, was in a better financial situation than some of his colleagues throughout the 1860s since he got a stipend from his father.
Sisley started dating a Breton in Paris named Eugénie Lescouezec (1834-1898), also known as Marie Lescouezec, in 1866. Son Pierre was born in 1867, and daughter Jeanne was born in 1870. (1869). At the period, Sisley lived close to the Café Guerbois, where many Parisian painters congregated, and Avenue de Clichy.
While his works were selected for the Salon in 1868, both the show and the following ones were financially and critically successful for him.
The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, which led to the collapse of Sisley's father's business and the artist's dependency on the selling of his creations as support. He would continue to live in poverty because his paintings' worth greatly improved after his passing. However, Sisley would periodically receive financial help from patrons, which allowed him to do various things, including take a few quick journeys to Britain. Following the first autonomous Impressionist exhibition, the first of these did take place in 1874. A series of nearly twenty wall paintings of the non-tidal Thames at East
Molesey and below its Hampton Court Bridge, where the south bank turns into Thames Ditton, were the result of spending weeks in the southwest of England. Art dealer Kenneth Clark later referred to these paintings as "a right moment of Painting and sculpture."
Sisley returned to Britain again for a brief while in 1881.
Sisley and his companion returned to the country in 1897, and on August 5, 1897, they were wed in Cardiff, Wales, at the Cardiff Register Office.
They decided to stay in Penarth, the place of at least six oil paintings by Sisley of the sea and cliffs. He made at least eleven oil paintings in the vicinity of Rotherslade (then known as Lady's Cove) and Langland Bay after they relocated to the Osborne Hotel in Langland Bay on the Gower Peninsula amid August. In October, they left for France once more. Sisley's trip to his ancestral home was his final one. Two of his oil paintings of Langland and Penarth are kept by the National Museum of Cardiff.
Sisley tried to obtain French citizenship the next year but was denied. A 2nd application was submitted and was preceded by a police report, but Sisley's health precluded him from changing his citizenship before his death.
A few months after the ability to pass off his wife, he passed away on January 29, 1899, in Moret-sur-Loing, France, at the age of 59 from throat cancer. His stays were interred in the Moret-sur-Loing Cemetery beside those of his wife.
Works
The student work of Sisley is gone. Dark browns, greens, and light blues are the bright colors in his first gloomy landscape paintings. They were commonly put to death in Saint-Cloud and Marly. Little is known about Sisley's correlation to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, which he might have seen in London. Still, some have presumed that these artists — Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot — may have effected his growth as an Expressionistic painter.
The subject matter and flair of earlier present painters Edouard Manet and Camille Pissarro served as inspiration for him. Monet, whose work Sisley mimics in both style and subject matter but whose results are more subdued, has eclipsed Sisley among the Impressionists. His work powerfully evokes the atmosphere, and his grey clouds are consistently impressive. Art expert Robert Rosenblum described his paintings as having "almost a generic character, an impersonal textbook idea of a perfect Impressionist painting." More commonly than any other Expressionistic painter, he emphasized the landscape.
The Art Institute of Chicago seems to own Sand Heaps and Main road in Moret, two of Sisley's most well-known pieces. The Arch at Moret-sur-Loing is on exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. 3 times from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, Allée des peupliers de Moret (The Lane of Poplars at Moret) has been stolen: once in 1978 while on the line of credit in Marseilles (recovered a few days later in the city's sewers), once in 1998 (when the museum's curator was convicted of the theft and sentenced to five years in prison with two accomplices), and once in August 2007. (on 4 June 2008, French police recovered it and three other stolen paintings from a van in Marseilles).
There have been a lot of fake Sisleys found. Around 900 oil paintings, 100 pastels, and numerous other drawings were made by Sisley.
Several Sisley pieces were stolen from Jewish art collectors during the Nazi era (1933–1945) by Nazis or their agents as part of the widespread Jewish plundering that accompanied the Holocaust. In a ceremony held in Paris on June 18, 2004, Sisley's Soleil de Printemps, le Loing (1892) was returned to the Louis Hirsch family.
Alain Dreyfus, a Swiss art dealer, and Christie's bidding company got into a fight in 2008 over a Sisley painting called First Day of Spring in Moret that the Lindon family was appealing over in Paris. Before identifying the work for sale, Dreyfus claimed that Christie needed to investigate the history or authenticity of the piece sufficiently.
Also in 2008, an agreement with the descendants of Benno and Frances Bernstein, who had held the Sisley Bateux en Réparation à Saint Mammès (1885) before Nazi rule, was achieved after it was confirmed that the Nazis had looted the painting.
The Nazi looting group known as the E.R.R. was known to have considered several more Sisleys, including Winter Landscape, but they have never been recovered.
There are 24 listings for Sisley on the German Lost Art Foundation.
Famous Artworks
Under Hampton Court Bridge (1874)
The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring (1875)
The Small Meadows in Spring, By (c. 1881)
Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La Celle-Saint-Cloud (1865)
View of Montmartre from Cité des Fleurs to Les Batignolles (1869)
The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872)
Louveciennes. Sentier de la Mi-côte [fr] (1873)
Hampton Court Bridge (painting) (1874)
Molesey Weir – Morning (1874)
Regatta at Molesey (1874)
Ferry to the Ile-de-la-Loge – Flood (1872)
La Grande-Rue, Argenteuil (c. 1872)
Square in Argenteuil (Rue de la Chaussee) (1872)
Footbridge at Argenteuil [fr] (1872)