108. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
The Large Bathers, 1884-1887.
Oil on canvas, 117.8 x 170.8 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
109. Alfred Sisley, Snow Effect at Louveciennes, 1874.
Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm.
Private Collection, London.
110. Alfred Sisley, The Snow at Louveciennes, 1878.
Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
ALFRED SISLEY
Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on 30 October 1839 to English parents. His father William Sisley, a native of Manchester, was a businessman who exported artificial flowers to America. Alfred’s mother, Felicia Sell, came from an old family of London intellectuals. She brought her son up to love the arts, particularly music, and educated him in good manners. Still, there was no thought of his pursuing fine arts as a career, as of yet. When the well-brought up young man reached eighteen years of age his parents sent him to England. They assumed he would study business and the problems of coffee and cotton sales. Alfred himself took the opportunity to become immersed in England’s cultural life. He spent five years in England, from 1857 to 1861, and it was in the country of Shakespeare that he felt himself to be English for the first time. He studied English literature, but was even more interested in England’s great master painters. Returning to Paris in 1862, Sisley was able to get his parents’ permission to study painting. In October 1862 fate brought him to Charles Gleyre’s free studio, where Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille had come to study. They very quickly became inseparable. In spite of Monet’s incontestably dominant role, the shy, modest Sisley remained independent, and firm in his convictions. He drew with care and patience, fully determined to quickly attain perfection.
It was Sisley who had encouraged his friends to give up their apprenticeship at Gleyre’s studio and go out to paint from nature. He was outraged, far more so than his friends, at Gleyre’s arrogant attitude towards landscapes. From the beginning, landscape for Sisley was not just an essential pictorial genre, it was the one and only genre in which he was to work his entire life.
After leaving Gleyre, Sisley often painted together with Monet, Renoir, and Bazille in the environs of Paris. In 1865, at the invitation of Jules Le Coeur, a friend of Renoir’s, Sisley and Renoir went to paint in the little village of Marlotte at the edge of Fontainebleau forest. At the same time Monet and Bazille were working in the depths of the forest, at Chailly-en-Biere. These villages were not very far from each other, and the friends often met up, especially at old Mother Anthony’s little inn, which can be seen in Renoir’s painting. Sisley and Renoir spent the autumn and winter of 1865 at Marlotte. One of their landscapes from that winter, Village Road at Marlotte (Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery) was accepted at the Salon of 1866. Its scenographic composition and dark, brownish colour scheme show that he was still heavily influenced by Barbizon-School painting – the location itself encouraged it.
In Paris Sisley changed address several times. One of his apartments was in the Cité des Fleurs, in Batignolles (View of Montmartre from the Cité des Fleurs, Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble). In Sisley’s painting Montmartre is seen in the distance, behind a dark green field. There is nothing romantic about it. The painting’s colour scheme is still dark. A sad, anxious atmosphere appears here for the first time, as well, which Sisley’s painting would always retain. From 1870 onward the first characteristics of the style that later would become typical of Impressionist painting began to appear in Sisley’s painting. Barges on the Saint-Martin Canal (Winterthur, Oskar Reinhart Foundation) are painted using broken brushstrokes of pure colour or colour mixed with lead white. From this point forward the colour scheme in Sisley’s paintings becomes distinctly lighter. This new technique creates an impression of vibrating water with brightly coloured shimmering on its surface, and of a crisp clarity in the atmosphere. Light, in Sisley’s paintings, has been born.
Sisley spent the period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune on the outskirts of Paris. In 1872 Pissarro and Monet introduced him to Paul Durand-Ruel, whom they had met in London. From that point up until the end of his life, the Durand-Ruels bought paintings of Sisley’s, although at the time his painting had no following yet, and it was not easy to sell his work. Over the course of the four years he lived in Louveciennes, Sisley painted numerous landscapes of the banks of the Seine. He discovered Argenteuil and the little town of Villeneuve-la-Garenne, which in his work would remain the very image of silence and tranquility – of a world that civilisation and industry had not yet disfigured. He was not, in contrast to Pissarro, searching for prosaic accuracy. His landscapes are always coloured by his emotional attitude towards them. As with Monet, Sisley’s bridges are set in the countryside in a completely natural way. A serene blue sky is reflected in the barely stirring surface of the river. In harmony with this, some small, light-coloured houses and the coolness of the greenery create the impression of sunlight. From this moment onward Sisley’s vision becomes purely Impressionist as he turns the old system of aerial perspective upside-down.
Indeed, no matter what his motif was, Sisley always constructed his perspective so as to draw the gaze towards the background of the painting. A path going off in the distance became one of his favourite motifs. In the well-kept, appealing little town of Argenteuil (Place d’Argenteuil, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), the viewer’s eye follows the small figures of passersby right along to the end of the street. The Sèvres road (Louveciennes, Sèvres Road, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), lined with thin young trees, invites the viewer on a melancholy autumn stroll: one wants to slowly go farther and farther out, where the path descends, revealing a view of the surrounding hills. The river, in Sisley’s landscapes, is also a route that invites one to travel far away. The river and the sky are one and the same in this pale azure blue (The Seine at Bougival, Paris, Musée d’Orsay). It is precisely in these places that Sisley discovered the effects that changes in colour had on the snow. He painted the snow-covered streets of Louveciennes, with light blue shadows, and the little bright patches of the clothes of passersby.
111. Alfred Sisley, Snow at Port-Marly, White Frost, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 65.5 cm.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
112. Alfred Sisley, Flood at Port-Marly, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm. Private Collection.
113. Alfred Sisley, The Bridge of Moret, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 65 x 92 cm.
Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, Minneapolis.
114. Alfred Sisley,
The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 65.4 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
115. Alfred Sisley, Flood at Port-Marly, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 60 x 81 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Sisley participated in organising the clan’s first exhibition and showed five landscapes there; almost no one noticed them. He then presented works at two other exhibitions, after which he provided paintings only for the seventh and next-to-last exhibition. He was never as productive as Pissarro and the number of his landscapes in the exhibitions was distinctly less than those of his friends’. Still, Sisley never disassociated himself from the Impressionists, and remained faithful to the common cause.
After the first exhibition Sisley spent several months in England in company with the famous opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was buying the Impressionists’ paintings. In misty England, as strange as it might seem, Sisley’s palette became still richer in colour. His English landscapes have the look of one grand celebration. Sisley’s motifs remained the same as in France. Like Monet he painted regattas with coloured pennants (Regattas at Molesey, near Hampton Court, Paris, Musée d’Orsay). The blue water of the Thames is painted with lively, broken brushstrokes, making the red of the boats chopping through it still brighter (Regattas at Ham
pton Court, Zurich, Bührle Foundation).
On his return from England, Sisley moved from Louveciennes to Marly-le Roi. The three years he spent there were a period of maturity and intense creative activity. His landscapes became a kind of chronicle of the life of a tranquil little provincial town. When Sisley worked on the Hoschédé estate at Montgeron he also painted water in the foreground, even if it was only a narrow portion of the pond (The Hoschédé Garden, Montgeron, Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). Around this period Sisley truly became a painter of water. It cast a spell over him, forcing him to scrutinise its changing surface and to study its nuances of colour, as Monet did the meadows at Giverny. The landscapes devoted to the Port-Marly flood are a crowning achievement. The painter plays with space and perspective, in the end finding the only possible solution: the pink house is frozen in a world where the sky merges with the earth, where the reflection barely ripples, and the clouds glide slowly by. Sisley is the only Impressionist whose landscapes do not limit themselves to nature’s changing beauty but extend to other realms, sometimes of dreams, sometimes of philosophical reflection (Flood at Port Marly).
116. Alfred Sisley, Banks of the Loing River, 1885.
Oil on canvas, 55.1 x 73.3 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
117. Alfred Sisley, The Bridge of Moret, 1893.
Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
118. Alfred Sisley, The Church at Moret, Evening, 1894.
Oil on canvas, 101 x 82 cm.
Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts
de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
After Marly the Sisley family lived in Sèvres for two years. Their situation was very difficult, the paintings weren’t selling, and it was only thanks to Georges Charpentier that they were able to make ends meet. In 1879, searching for a way out of his day-to-day difficulties, Sisley renounced Impressionist principles and submitted some paintings to be evaluated by the Salon judges. He was newly disappointed, and it reduced him to despair, but Sisley was not one to complain. In 1880 he and his family moved farther from Paris, along the banks of the Loing River, first to a village and then to the little town of Moret. Actually, he was returning to the places of the group’s youth, for Moret was located at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. “Moret is two hours from Paris,” he wrote Claude Monet, “and has plenty of houses for rent at prices going from six cents to a thousand francs. There’s a weekly market, a very pretty church, and fairly picturesque views” (F. Daulte, Sisley. Paysages [Sisley. Landscapes], op. cit., p. 36). He remained there the rest of his life, and his canvases are a remarkable poem to this region.
Loyalty and steadfastness were central to Sisley’s character. He worked in the open air his whole life, which is why he always painted on smaller sized canvases of the type sold pre-prepared in the art supply shops. But now, instead of the old romantic trails that descended into the forest, he painted the bare branches of wind-battered trees, and in this way realised the Impressionist dream of rendering nature in painting, as it is. Thanks to his formal variety and the direction of his touches of colour over the ploughed earth and the sky, Sisley was truly able to paint, not just the fruit trees at Veneux, but the wind itself (The Countryside at Véneux, Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum). The fragile branches sway and snap, and clouds come and go at a brisk pace. The sky is another essential element in Sisley’s landscapes: without the sky they wouldn’t exist. “The sky can’t be just a background,” he wrote to the critic Tavernier. “On the contrary, it not only contributes to establishing depth with its planes (for the sky has planar depth just like the land), it also establishes movement through its form and its arrangement with respect to the painting’s effect, or composition.”
Sisley died at his home next to the church in Moret on 29 January 1899. He had only survived his wife by one year. He was born in France, and he loved the country, yet was not even able to obtain French citizenship. One day, in conversation with the old Impressionist Pissarro, a young painter, Henri Matisse, asked him what it meant to be an Impressionist. Pissarro answered that an Impressionist was one who painted a new painting every time. To the next question – “So, who was the most representative of the Impressionists ?” – Pissarro responded without hesitating: “Alfred Sisley.”
119. Alfred Sisley, The Church at Moret in the Rain, 1894.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
120. Camille Pissarro, The Louveciennes Road, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 60 x 73.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
121. Camille Pissarro,
The Versailles Road at Louveciennes, 1870.
Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 81 cm.
Stiftung Sammlung Emil G. Bührle, Zurich.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Camille Pissarro’s life began in an exotic world, on the rocky island of Saint Thomas not far from Puerto Rico. His father, “Pissarro the Jew,” owned a hardware store and wished to see his children carry on the business. He sent his son to France to study at a respectable secondary school in Passy, where Camille stayed for six years. This is where he began to draw and the principal of the school encouraged his student’s artistic inclinations. When he returned to the island Camille quietly busied himself at the hardware store for five years, but continued to draw. One day, while he was supervising merchandise being loaded at the port and sketching the sailors as they worked, he drew the attention of the painter Melby, who was travelling through Saint Thomas. He persuaded Camille that he, too, could become a painter. Afterwards, Pissarro recalled he would not have been able to tolerate the quiet life at home for long, though he was well paid as an employee. Camille drew continually, depicting everything he saw around him. He was fully aware that he would become a professional, and for this reason did an incalculable number of sketches and studies. At the time landscapes were already the centre of his attention, and he strove to learn how to render spacial depth and lay out the composition of a painting. Seeing how serious his intentions were, his father himself sent Pissarro to Paris to study at the École des beaux-arts.
The 1855 Universal Exhibition set out the different directions possible for him. There were works by Delacroix and landscapes by Daubigny, Jongkind, and Millet. It was impossible to overlook Courbet’s “Realist Pavillion”. But the young painter from Saint Thomas was particularly drawn to Corot’s painting. He even decided to go and see Corot, and ask his permission to become his student. Corot didn’t accept students, but he agreed to give Pissarro advice.
In 1859 Pissarro’s parents moved to Paris as well. His mother’s personal maid was a young peasant from Burgundy, Julie Velay. Camille fell in love with her, but his father refused to recognise their union and withdrew his son’s monthly allowance. This was the start of the financial difficulties that were to continue to the end of Pissarro’s life. Camille and Julie were married in 1870, in England, and she remained a loyal companion throughout the painter’s difficult life.
After he moved to Paris, Pissarro apparently tried to study at different studios connected to the École des beaux-arts, but soon became disappointed, and preferred to attend the Académie Suisse. It was at the Académie Suisse that he met Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. Pissarro never took lessons at Gleyre’s. Bazille, who had met him one day at Édouard Manet’s, brought him to the Closerie des Lilas, where they all liked to meet. He was six years older than the future Impressionists and two years older than Édouard Manet. His young friends soon nicknamed him “Père [Old Man] Pissarro”. He was impassioned, intelligent, and kind, and indeed became a sort of “father” to the Impressionists. As he appears in his Self-Portrait – in his painting smock, against a background of studies hanging on the wall – Pissarro is forty-three years old and, with his spreading beard and serious, direct gaze, he looked very much the patriarch. The first of the critics to speak of Pissarro was Zola, in 1866: “M. Pissarro,
(…) be informed that no one likes you here, that they feel your painting is too bare, too dark (…). An austere, solemn way of painting, an extreme concern for truth and justice, a fierce, intense will. You are enormously awkward, sir – you are an artist I like” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 25). The landscape Banks of the Marne in Winter (Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago) was accepted by the Salon in 1866. That same year Pissarro moved to the small town of Pontoise.
But landscape painters are often susceptible to a degree of instability. Pissarro was no different and felt the need to vary his locations, always searching for a landscape where he could fully express himself. In 1868 he settled down very close to Paris, in Louveciennes, where Sisley and Renoir’s relatives lived. His house was on the road from Versailles to Saint-Germain. As a Danish national he was not drafted during the Franco-Prussian war, and when the Prussian army drew close to Louveciennes, Pissarro fled to Brittany with his family to his friend Piette’s farm. They left hurriedly, and he wasn’t able to take his paintings with him. The works at Louveciennes included not just his own, but canvases Monet had stored with him, as well. The Prussian soldiers who occupied Pissarro’s house destroyed almost 150 of these paintings: they threw them over the muddy paths of the garden, soggy with rain, to make it easier for them to come and go. During this time Pissarro was in London, where his cousin lived and where his mother had gone. He met with Claude Monet and the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. But he had only one wish, to return to France.
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