Lot Essay
The year 1879 was a turbulent one for Sisley; his financial difficulties made him turn once again to the Salon only to find himself rejected. Unable to pay the rent, he was about to be evicted when the financier, Georges Charpentier, helped him to move to a new home at 164 Grande Rue in Sèvres. He painted a number of views of the town and its surrounding villages (see lot 7) and despite the severe privations and lack of commercial success, he continued to remain a true Impressionist painter by concentrating on light, colour and atmosphere. It was also about this time that he developed his mature style of varied surface texture by using looser, freer and more rhythmical brush strokes.
Sisley never enjoyed widely acclaimed fame or great financial success in his life-time although, towards the end of his career, his talent was beginning to receive recognition from his contemporaries. Camille Mauclair in The French Impressionists (1860-1900) declared that Sisley's landscapes, "will figure among the most charming landscapes of our epoch...But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the Ile de France, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is the painter of great blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of red-roofed hamlets scattered about; he is beyond all, the painter of French skies which he represents with admirable vivacity and facility." (Christopher Lloyd, "The Case for Alfred Sisley" in Retrospective, Alfred Sisley, Tokyo, 1985, p. 16).
In an article in Paris Journal on 7 March 1882, Ernest Chesneau wrote, "Sisley has masterfully taken possession of the banks and waters of the Seine where breeze, like a moving mirror, splinters into a thousand pieces of the gold of autumn leaves and scatters of opal reflections of light, fleecy clouds, their soft gray drenched with melancholy."
Sisley never enjoyed widely acclaimed fame or great financial success in his life-time although, towards the end of his career, his talent was beginning to receive recognition from his contemporaries. Camille Mauclair in The French Impressionists (1860-1900) declared that Sisley's landscapes, "will figure among the most charming landscapes of our epoch...But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the Ile de France, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is the painter of great blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of red-roofed hamlets scattered about; he is beyond all, the painter of French skies which he represents with admirable vivacity and facility." (Christopher Lloyd, "The Case for Alfred Sisley" in Retrospective, Alfred Sisley, Tokyo, 1985, p. 16).
In an article in Paris Journal on 7 March 1882, Ernest Chesneau wrote, "Sisley has masterfully taken possession of the banks and waters of the Seine where breeze, like a moving mirror, splinters into a thousand pieces of the gold of autumn leaves and scatters of opal reflections of light, fleecy clouds, their soft gray drenched with melancholy."