Sisley concentrated on painting landscapes more consistently than any other Impressionist painter. These artists often gathered at Café Guerbois on the Grande rue des Batignolles, where they met Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and others who were part of, or sympathetic to, the Impressionist movement. His early style was also deeply influenced by Courbet and Daubigny.įrom 1862, he studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts (at the studio of Charles Gleyr) with fellow students Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Through Corot’s influence he retained a passionate interest in the sky, which nearly always dominated his paintings, and also in the effects of snow, which he combined to create strongly dramatic effects. (He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1867 as Corot’s pupil.) However he returned to London in 1861, where, like Pissarro, Camille Corot’s Realist landscape paintings strongly influenced his style. Early in his career, he spent four years in London studying J.M.W. For information, 20 or Sisley, The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872Īlfred Sisley’s English heritage and Parisian upbringing served him well in developing as an Impressionist landscape artist. The show will also be a focus for visitors of special groups including the museum’s Lifetime of Looking program for guests with memory loss, and the community partner program through Abilis for visitors with developmental disabilities. In addition to the Bruce Museum’s regularly scheduled adult tours, school programs and hands-on in-gallery family activities, special public programming to complement the exhibition in Connecticut will include a graduate student symposium, the only one of its kind in the region, featuring PhD students from leading art history programs who will present their original research on the multifaceted ways in which artists frame nature in their work. Contributors to this volume, Richard Shone, who wrote a book on the painter, and Kathleen Adler, a Nineteenth Century French specialist, bring new insights that ensure the publication will be an indispensable reference on the artist and his oeuvre. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by Editions Hazan. The show is curated by MaryAnne Stevens, independent art historian and curator of the 1992//03 retrospective exhibitions on the artist. They demand close, quiet contemplation and their reevaluation is well overdue. While his landscapes are generally modest in scale and tonally relatively restrained, the magic with which he was able to capture the effects of the light dancing on water, the brilliance of winter sun on snow and hoar frost, the movement of the wind in trees, the exploration of the depth of a rural scene and the vastness of the skies create compelling works akin to poetry. One could say that light floods his landscapes, deliciously bathing even the most modest of details. He knew how to imbue all of his paintings with it. Sisley was first and foremost a painter of light. In so doing he charted comprehensively and from multiple points of view the landscapes of his residences in the villages along the Seine west of Paris and beyond the Forest of Fontainebleau at Veneux-Nadon and Moret-sur-Loing. Initially Sisley worked in the naturalistic landscape tradition of the Barbizon School, but increasingly adopted a proto-Impressionistic style, recording specific locations in a sequence of visual records of different times of the day, weather conditions and seasons. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon. “Flood at Port-Marly,” 1872, oil on canvas. On his return to Paris, he was determined to become a landscape painter and enrolled in Charles Gleyre’s studio, where he met the future Impressionists Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille. During this time, he visited museums, studying both the Old Masters and the great British landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. The show will then travel to France, where it will be on exhibit from June through October.īorn in Paris to well-to-do British parents, Sisley at first intended to pursue a career in commerce and spent two years in London from 1857 to 1859. The Bruce Museum will premiere the exhibition January 21-May 21, and is the only venue in the United States. The first retrospective in more than 20 years of this purest of all the major Impressionists, “Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master” spotlights about 50 of Sisley’s paintings, which come from private collections and major museums in Europe and North America. – The Bruce Museum and the Hôtel de Caumont Centre d’Art in Aix-en-Provence, France, are mounting a major monographic exhibition of the art of the French Impressionist Alfred Sisley. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mr and Mrs Henry Ittleson Jr, 1964. “The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne,” 1872, oil on canvas.
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