Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley

Autumn Landscape
Sisley, Alfred
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Alfred Sisley was born in Paris to British parents, William Sisley and Felicia nee Sell.

In the early 1860s he became a student in the atelier of Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Frederic Bazille, Claude Monet and Renoir. Unlike some of his fellow students who suffered financial hardships, Alfred Sisley recieved an allowance from his father. Sisley's student works are lost; his earliest known work, "Lane Near a Small Town", is believed to have been painted around 1864.

In the late 1860s, he entered into a relationship with Eugenie Lescouezec, with whom he had two children. This relationship continued for over 30 years, ending with her death a few months before Alfred Sisley's death in 1899.

An excerpt from Richard Shone's work "Alfred Sisley":

"No substantial biography of Alfred Sisley has yet been written. His life is not well documented and this has furthered his neglect. Although he wrote many letters, few are personally revealing or of exceptional interest. There are no journals or
autobiographical writings and he died before celebrity might have sent interviewers and photographers to his door. At the same time, the change in his character from high spirits and sociability to a seemingly misanthropic and suspicious demeanour accounts for the virtual disappearance of his name from the memoirs and letters of several of his early friends. As a result of this profil perdu, the few facts about Sisley's life that have long been taken for granted have not been thoroughly examined. Since the publication in 1959 of Francois Daulte's catalogue raisonne, almost no research has investigated Sisley's life - misstatements and misconceptions abound. Several of these have been corrected...and use has been made of unpublished letters and archival documents. These modify or illuminate at many points the biographical outline of Alfred Sisley and set his work in a more palpable context. New material has shaped the narrative and deepened that sense of Sisley as resourceful, proud and solitary. In a passage on the landscapes of Ruisdael, written in 1875, Eugene Fromentin wrote of the Dutch painter as

a dreamer, one of those men of whom many exist in our own day but who were rare in Ruisdael's time - one of those lonely wanderers who flee from the town, frequent the outskirts, who love the country without exaggeration and describe it without phrases, who are made uneasy by distant horizons but are charmed by open country, moved by a shadow and enchanted by a shaft of sunlight.

He goes on to suggest the sombre reasonableness of Ruisdael's melancholy, the product neither of self-indulgent immaturity nor of the fretful self pity of old age. No one familiar with Sisley's painting or his character can fail to be reminded of them by Fromentin's words. They were written in the year when Sisley produced some of his finest paintings, and at the start of one of the most discouraging periods of his life. He was at the height of his powers, superbly endowed with gifts that place his achievements on a level with those of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. In particular, he faultlessly conveys those startling moments of perception in which a scene is removed from its surroundings, however commonplace, and steeped in an undefinable emotion - the Marly aqueduct, the flooded inn by the Seine, a passer by in the snow, a girl swinging in an orchard, a wave breaking over a rock on the shore. He has the power of transcribing such scenes as though be had been searching for them all along, and yet he reveals them with an air of diffidence that disarms while it captivates. It is at such moments that Alfred Sisley enlarges our perception of Impressionist painting and joins the ranks of the great European landscapists."- From Richard Shone, "Sisley"

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