Alfred Sisley (1839 — 1899) was born in Paris to well-to-do British parents. Initially, he was intended to pursue a career in commerce. Parents sent their 18-year teenager to London, where he spent two years, from 1857 to 1859. In British capital he visited museums, studying both the Old Masters and the great British landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
On his return to Paris, Sisley was determined to become an artist and enrolled in Charles Gleyre's studio. There he met and became friends with the future Impressionists Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1864.
Landscapes by Alfred Sisley are generally small in scale and tonally relatively restrained. However, the magic with which he captured the effects of the light, the dancing glare on water, the brilliance of winter sun on snow and hoar frost, the movement of the wind in trees, and the depth of the skies create compelling works akin to poetry. They demand close, quiet contemplation and evaluation.
"His very delicate, lively sensibility was at ease before all the glories of nature… Sisley understood lovely light, the transparency of the envelope of air, the mobility and changeability of reflections, the speed of movement", wrote an art critic, Octave Mirbeau in 1892.
Left: Alfred Sisley, L'église de Moret au soleil du matin (The Church at Moret in Morning Sun), 1893.
The retrospective underlines Sisley’s artistic ascendance over his Impressionist confrères. Visitors will be able to evaluate Sisley’s radical pictorial strategies in 1870-s, the influence of Japanese prints, photography, seventeenth-century Dutch art, and Constable and Turner on his approach, as well as influence of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Eugène Boudin.
