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Lot Essay
In La Seine à Saint-Cloud, the Impressionist Sisley used bold, lyrical brushstrokes to manifest the intangible qualities of water, light and air. The depicted landscape, and the surface of the painting itself, is alive with color, texture and movement: the Seine River flows, fluffy white clouds swirl and emerald green blades of grass flicker in the breeze. The artist found poetry and formal inspiration in nature; as he wrote to a friend in the late 1870s, "The sky is not simply a background...the shapes of clouds give movement to a picture. What is more beautiful indeed than the summer sky, with its wispy clouds idly floating across blue? What movement and grace!" (quoted in "The Relevance of Impressionism" in Art News, January 1969, vol. 67, no. 9, p. 35).
In Sisley's idyllic vision of the town of Saint Cloud, the human infrastructure—buildings, bridges and boats—were secondary to the sublime choreography of nature. While painting this glorious riverscape en plein air, Sisley directly observed and recorded his impressions of sun and shadow upon the water; he brilliantly summarized this ever changing, reflective surface with bravura horizontal dashes of color. He only hastily noted the presence of factory smokestacks or church steeples on shore. In this particular composition, human figures are entirely absent; nature reigns supreme.
This canvas has been dated to the late 1870s, during which time the artist moved with his wife and children between rented homes in Saint-Cloud and neighboring towns. Despite his personal itineracy and financial instability, this was a pivotal and productive phase of Sisley's career. As the art historian Christopher Lloyd asserted, 'During the years when Sisley lived in Marly-le-Roi and Sèvres, he painted some of the finest pictures in his oeuvre' (Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 149). In 1877, Sisley submitted seventeen landscape paintings to the third Impressionist show was staged in Paris, making him one of the most prolific contributors to the movement that year.
Like many of his Impressionist colleagues, Sisley received mixed reviews from contemporary critics at these exhibitions. Emile Zola hailed him as a "landscapist of great talent," while Jean Prouvaire disapproved of the seemingly unfinished, sketchy quality of his paintings (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., pp. 142 and 186). Yet Sisley earned the greatest approval from the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who praised the dynamic qualities of his work: "Sisley seizes the passing moments of the day; watches a fugitive cloud and seems to paint it in its flight; on his canvass [sic] the live air moves and the leaves yet thrill and tremble...the breeze stirring the foliage prevents it from becoming an opaque mass, too heavy for such an impression of mobility and life" (quoted in R. Shone, Sisley, New York, 1992, pp. 118-122).
La Seine à Saint-Cloud once belonged to Josef Rosensaft, a Holocaust survivor. Rosensaft went on to build a large art collection in the second half of the twentieth century, which included Impressionist masterpieces by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Sisley.
In Sisley's idyllic vision of the town of Saint Cloud, the human infrastructure—buildings, bridges and boats—were secondary to the sublime choreography of nature. While painting this glorious riverscape en plein air, Sisley directly observed and recorded his impressions of sun and shadow upon the water; he brilliantly summarized this ever changing, reflective surface with bravura horizontal dashes of color. He only hastily noted the presence of factory smokestacks or church steeples on shore. In this particular composition, human figures are entirely absent; nature reigns supreme.
This canvas has been dated to the late 1870s, during which time the artist moved with his wife and children between rented homes in Saint-Cloud and neighboring towns. Despite his personal itineracy and financial instability, this was a pivotal and productive phase of Sisley's career. As the art historian Christopher Lloyd asserted, 'During the years when Sisley lived in Marly-le-Roi and Sèvres, he painted some of the finest pictures in his oeuvre' (Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 149). In 1877, Sisley submitted seventeen landscape paintings to the third Impressionist show was staged in Paris, making him one of the most prolific contributors to the movement that year.
Like many of his Impressionist colleagues, Sisley received mixed reviews from contemporary critics at these exhibitions. Emile Zola hailed him as a "landscapist of great talent," while Jean Prouvaire disapproved of the seemingly unfinished, sketchy quality of his paintings (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., pp. 142 and 186). Yet Sisley earned the greatest approval from the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who praised the dynamic qualities of his work: "Sisley seizes the passing moments of the day; watches a fugitive cloud and seems to paint it in its flight; on his canvass [sic] the live air moves and the leaves yet thrill and tremble...the breeze stirring the foliage prevents it from becoming an opaque mass, too heavy for such an impression of mobility and life" (quoted in R. Shone, Sisley, New York, 1992, pp. 118-122).
La Seine à Saint-Cloud once belonged to Josef Rosensaft, a Holocaust survivor. Rosensaft went on to build a large art collection in the second half of the twentieth century, which included Impressionist masterpieces by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Sisley.