France’s economic crisis strongly affected the art world in Paris, making it especially difficult for artists painting in a new radical style to find support and patrons. Without his generosity Sisley would have surely starved. Murer, a great lover of painting, who good-heartedly accepted Sisley’s canvases as payment for meals at his establishment. Sisley and Renoir often found a table at the restaurant owned by M. Lacking a wealthy family, a condition that enabled the rest of the Impressionists to paint, Sisley depended on the kindness of friends to get by. Few of the impressionists endured the hardships that befell Sisley, who was reduced at one point to selling copies of Rousseau’s paintings and his own canvases for twenty-five to thirty francs. Unfortunately, he did not fair much better at the exhibition of 1876, two years later. Though the show caused quite a scandal, generating a lot of press, though most of it negative, the subsequent sale, run by Paul Durand-Ruel at the Hotel Drouot, resulted in the artist’s twenty-one pictures bringing in only a little over two thousand francs, a bitter disappointment for the artist. The Exposition Indépendantes, the first Impressionist show at Nadar’s that so affected the course of modern art, contained no less than twenty-one canvases by Sisley. Sisley, for the first time, was forced to paint with a commercial mind-set, selling landscapes for fifty francs each in order to support his family. Having been financially supported by his family, and never worrying about having to earn his living as an artist, Sisley was shocked to learn upon the death of his father that the family business lay in ruins. Sisley returned to England from 1870 to 1871 (during the Franco-Prussian War) where he exhibited, and again in 1874. Sisley painted in the French countryside with Renoir in 1866, his first year at the Salon, where he was received as a student of Corot, and in 1867 stayed for a time with Bazille, who painted his portrait that year. Inseparable for a time, the group traveled and painted together, Sisley’s early style being particularly influenced by the paintings of Corot, Courbet and Daubigny whom he met while working around Paris with his companions. Though none of the four felt a particular affinity for the highly academic and somewhat pedantic Gleyre, it was young Monet’s personality-clash with the master that resulted in the group leaving the studio and setting out on their own. Fellow students of Gleyre included Renoir, Monet and Bazille their friendship was to revolutionize painting and radically change the history of art. Sisley died in 1899, three months after the death of his wife Eugénie.Born in Paris to bourgeois British parents, Sisley received an excellent education, even studying English and business in London before returning to Paris where his father arranged for the twenty-three year old to enter the studio of the history painter Charles Gleyre in 1862. In this sense, his formal strategies are indebted to France’s Barbizon group, and particularly the work of Camille Corot. As part of the Impressionists, who sought to depict the world they inhabited, his compositions are not purely pastoral yet in paintings such as Allée of Chestnut Trees (1878), and Flood at Port-Marly (1872), nature dominates all. Throughout his life, Sisley remained essentially a painter of landscapes, and along with his contemporaries, spent much time working en plein air. Sisley would go on to show paintings at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1875, though his success remained modest. He and his family moved to the Parisian suburbs, near to Monet and Camille Pissarro, and together they began to develop exhibitions outside of the Salon system. The onset of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 brought financial ruin to Sisley’s family as well as the death of Bazille.įollowing this personal - and political - period of upheaval, Sisley decided to make art his career. While he had work accepted to the Salon of 1866, subsequent submissions were rejected. Together they would develop a novel, visionary visual language: Impressionism. Sisley, however, was uninterested and spent his time wandering the city’s museums.īack in Paris four years later, he began to study art under Charles Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean-Frédéric Bazille. Born in 1839 in Paris, Sisley’s parents, who were English, initially hoped that he would work in commerce and sent the teenager to London to study business. Renowned for his use of colour and depiction of light, Alfred Sisley was a leading member of the French Impressionists.
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