Taking her lead from the current exhibition of Australian Impressionists and the forthcoming exhibition of Impressionist art from the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Helen Young has delved into the art of Alfred Sisley (18399-1899). Helen writes: We are familiar with Monet’s and John Russell’s seascapes, but not with those by Alfred Sisley. He was the only Impressionist to paint in Wales and to paint seascapes along the beautiful Welsh coast. Crowded beach and boating scenes were popular but, at the time, seascapes were unusual. His Welsh paintings have been neglected and while Sisley may have only painted in Wales briefly, it was a productive time for the artist.
Born in France, into a wealthy English merchant family, Sisley was 18 when he went to London to study commerce. During his three years in London his interest in art grew as he spent time in the National Gallery studying the Constable and Turner paintings. In 1856, JMW Turner’s bequest, which went on view for the first time, caused great interest. Turner had requested that two landscapes always be hung beside two Claude Lorraine landscapes ‘underlining affinities between English and French landscape art’. As well, Constable’s Gold Medal winning The Hay Wain, exhibited in the 1824 Salon, influenced Delacroix, the Barbizon artists and through them, the young Impressionists. Back in Paris in 1861 or 1862, and with his parent’s approval, Sisley entered the liberal and crowded art studio of Charles Gleyre where he met Charles Brazille, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir said of Sisley that ‘Sisley’s gift was gentleness. He was a delightful human being.’ [p. 44, Blunden M & G]
In the 1860s Sisley painted with them – often side-by-side in, for example, the Fontainebleau Forest which was only about an hour by train from Paris – as they searched for increasingly colourful and innovative ways to depict the natural world and atmospheric effects. Increasingly, they saw that ‘local’ colour was modified by surrounding objects and light or sunlight. They also created form using colour rather than tone and their brushwork became looser. There were new colours and the new malleable lead paint tubes made it easier to paint outdoors. Sisley’s early works were influenced by Courbet and Daubigny and he exhibited at the 1866 Salon as ‘a pupil of Corot’. He also exhibited in the 1868 and 1870 Salons, in Durant-Ruel’s Society of French Artists 1872/3 exhibitions in London – the first Impressionist exhibition – and he was one of the group who frequented the avant-garde Café Guerbois.
Unlike Monet and Pissarro who had escaped to London at the start of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, Sisley sought refuge in Paris as his home in Bougival, containing many pre-1870 works, had been destroyed. He was also the common-law husband and sole supporter of Eugenie Lescouezec and three children, so escape was impossible. Furthermore, during the war, his father’s business failed and, after his subsequent death, Sisley was left to suffer long periods of financial hardship. Still, it began a decade during which he found his own ‘distinctive artistic pathway’ [p.12, Riopelle]. Again painting along the Seine, he juxtaposed its leafy banks with the waterworks, boats, railway bridges and the new villas. He returned to England in 1874 to complete a commission of six paintings for his patron the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, after which he set off along the countrified Thames River with its colourful regattas, bridges, western suburbs and Hampton Court.
Even though it seemed that Sisley found both England and France equally conducive to painting, family responsibilities and the like-minded avant-garde and supportive artists in France drew him back there. He wouldn’t return to Britain for 23 years.
Sisley was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his use of pure colour and short rapid brushstrokes. The family moved to the hamlet Moret-su-Loing in 1882, and while he painted the area around the hamlet, for example, the mill and the church, he loved to paint the gentle rural scenes which celebrated nature in all its chromatic glory. Here in ‘February afternoon’ the afternoon light is clean and bright and the placid river beautifully captures reflections of simple farm buildings, the cool blue sky, and pink clouds. He painted near this spot four times. Sisley and fellow Impressionists often painted multiple versions of the same place – sometimes using slightly different perspectives – while noting the different seasons and times of the day. Multiples allowed them to examine and capture the effects of the ever changing light and atmospheric conditions. Monet’s series of haystacks was shown in the summer of 1891. Soon after, Sisley painted two works using differently shaped haystacks – the field, haystacks and sky shimmer in the ‘morning light’.
In February, 1897, Sisley held a one–man exhibition at George Petit’s gallery. And then in July, Sisley and his family visited Britain. Their trip was funded by businessman (ship-owner and coal exporter) and collector, Francois Depeaux, via an advance payment of three paintings. Neither Alfred nor Eugenie was in good health. After painting briefly in Falmouth, the family headed for Penarth, near Cardiff, Wales. Sisley was invigorated and in the course of painting around the Bristol Channel, Cardiff’s shipping lane, and the Penarth coast, he found the ‘countryside pretty’ and the shipping activity ‘superb’. On the 5th August, he and Marie-Adelaide-Eugenie Lescouezec, after more than thirty years together, married quietly in the Cardiff Registry office (in part to legitimise their children). Sisley also later arranged his French citizenship with the French Consul.
Their honeymoon was spent in the Osborne hotel which overlooked Langland Bay on the Gower Peninsula. The bay was also known as ‘Little Langland’ or The Lady’s Cove and is now known as Rotherslade Bay. Indebted to Monet, Sisley’s seascapes depict the pounding sea, spray, waves, and the changing tides, and so his paintings were quite a contrast to his usual harmonious, peaceful and lyrical countrysides. The south facing coast was rocky with high limestone cliffs. The sea could be powerful and not unlike Etretat or the island Belle-Ile where Monet and Russell painted.
Sisley similarly sometimes had to ‘struggle’ against the wind as he worked.
Sisley moved his easel around the bay capturing different perspectives, including swimmers near their bathing huts, and children playing on the beach. Below the hotel there was a large rocky outcrop known as Storr’s Rock. Sisley painted a powerful group of five which showed tidal effects on this rock as the sea transformed its appearance. His usual broken brushwork became bolder and freer than ever before. The paint was vigorously and thickly daubed, swept and slashed across the canvas, beautifully and dramatically capturing the changing mood of the sea as it lapped gently around the rock, left it and the pebbled beach almost high and dry, or crashed up and over it, making the pounded rocks glisten.
Sisley’s known output from this period was 20 canvases, plus related sketches and drawings and these were shipped back when the family returned to Moret in September, 1897. His ‘admirable sea pieces’ were favourably reviewed in an article on the 4th October, which appeared in Le Journal. Camille Pissarro and his sons also discussed the ‘sea pieces’. Felix Pissarro commented to his father that Sisley had… ‘’… done some splendid paintings by the sea, in a corner of the world that hardly anyone had ever heard of before.’’ (Three of the Welsh views were exhibited at the Salon de la Society National des Beaux-Arts in May, 1898).
Eugenie died in October, 1898 and Sisley died three months later. Monet arranged a posthumous exhibition and auction to benefit their children. Sisley participated in many exhibitions, including four Impressionist exhibitions, but often with little success. Sadly, Sisley’s diffident nature also meant that only in later life and after his death, was his work given due recognition. A number of the Welsh views did pass into French and British public and private collections, and, in 2004, the National Museum of Wales acquired Storr’s Rock, Lady’s Cove, Evening.
References:
Blunden M. & G., main text, Impressionists and Impressionism, Rizzoli International Pub. Ltd., USA, 1980
Riopelle C. and Sumner A., Sisley in England and Wales, National Gallery Company, London, distributed by Yale University Press
AGNSW and QAG, Belle-Ile: Monet, Russell and Matisse in Brittany, Published by AGNSW 2001
Denvir, B., The Chronicle of Impressionism: An Intimate Diary of the Lives and World of the Great Artists, Thames and Hudson, 2000
Thank you Helen for an interesting overview of Sisley’s seascapes.
The Wave appeals to me most.
I love its freedom.
Yes, lovely piece, Helen. Thank you.
Thank you Helen. So comprehensive, detailed, and useful for guiding.
Helen I echo the other guides – thank you for this beautiful piece on the wonderful Sisley and his seascapes.
Thank You Helen for such an informative and detailed look at Sisley’s work. The Welsh landscapes are beautiful – no doubt seen when you lived in Wales.