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Lot Essay
Depicting one of the subjects for which Alfred Sisley is best known, Le viaduc d’Auteuil of 1878 presents a striking juxtaposition of the natural landscape and modern human infrastructure. Sisley primarily worked en plein air to interpret the city-riverscape, and the ephemeral conditions of light and air, with paint. In the words of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the resulting image was “one of those Parisian landscapes on the banks of the Seine... where Nature passes here and there between the buildings, work and industry, like a blade of grass between a man’s fingers” (quoted in R.L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, New Haven, 1988, p. 202).
Sisley loved above all to paint the Seine.
François Daulte
In this painting, Sisley observed a freight train chugging across the titular viaduct, emitting plumes of purple and pink smoke against the pale blue sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds. Several barges are moored along the edge of Seine, with long wooden planks used to convey people and cargo onto the shore: a bank of raw, clay-brown earth with a few scattered patches of bright green grass. The riverscape is largely dominated by the bridge. The choppy surface of the river is only visible between the bridge's thick stone piers, and the golden glow of the afternoon sun is mediated by its round arches.
For Sisley, like his fellow Impressionist landscape painters Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, bridges were important vectors of modern urban life; they enabled the rapid transportation of industrial materials and consumer products, as well as the daily commutes of bourgeois and working class people. Bridges also served as powerful compositional devices, providing solid geometric structure to modern landscape paintings. In Le viaduc d'Auteuil, unlike other examples in his oeuvre, Sisley arranged the bridge flat against the picture plane, contrasting its horizontal stone bulk with the more dynamic, transient elements of light, shadow, water, smoke, cloud, and foliage. Yet Sisley rendered the human figures, grass, river, bridge, and train alike with the same thick, loose brushstrokes.
Sisley painted the Auteuil viaduct in 1878, a little over a decade after it was built. Also known as Le pont du Point-du-Jour, the railway bridge was conceived as part of Napoleon III's plan to expand and modernize Paris in the mid-1860s. The resulting two-level stone structure represented the grandeur of the Second Empire, and was even marked by the imperial insignia—the circular outline of which is only loosely suggested in Sisley’s painting. The bridge suffered major damage during the Paris Commune in 1871 and was subsequently restored under the Third Republic.
By the late 1870s, the bridge once again facilitated the movement of both people and goods in the capital city by connecting the 15e and 16e arrondissements—specifically, the neighborhoods of Beaugrenelle and Auteuil, which are situated directly across the Seine from one another. The upper level of the bridge supported a train track of the Petite Ceinture railway, a predecessor of the twentieth-century Parisian Métro, which encircled the city—the artist then lived with his family in Sèvres, a Parisian suburb that was two train stops away from Auteuil. The lower level of the bridge, dominated by a barrel-vaulted enfilade, allowed both pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages to cross the bridge underneath the railway, and for boats to pass on the river below.
In 1878, Sisley was at a crossroads in his own career. The year before, he had submitted seventeen canvases to the third Impressionist exhibition in an apartment at 6 rue le Peletier, across the street from the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. Critics and collectors reacted with ambivalence to Sisley's work, so a month later, he and several other artists organized a public auction in order to generate additional sales. Efforts to organize a fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1878 stalled, and when the project was resurrected in early 1879, Sisley declined to participate, despite his enduring attachment to the Impressionist style. As the artist wrote to the journalist Theodore Duret, “The moment has come for me to make a decision. It is true that our exhibitions have served to make us known and in this they have been very useful to me, but I believe we must not isolate ourselves for too long. We are still far from the moment when we shall be able to do without the prestige attached to official exhibitions. I am, therefore, determined to submit to the Salon" (quoted in J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 421).
Sisley’s Le viaduc d'Auteuil was first acquired by Catholina Lambert (1834-1923), a New York silk manufacturer who amassed a major collection of Old Master and Modern paintings. Lambert owned at least nine canvases by Sisley, in addition to a dozen other Impressionist landscape pictures by Monet and Pissarro. In 1899, Lambert sold Le viaduc d'Auteuil to the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. The painting passed through several other private collections, including that of Jack Chrysler (1912-1958), a scion of the American automobile manufacturing family, before it was acquired by Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson from M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., in May 1951.
Sisley loved above all to paint the Seine.
François Daulte
In this painting, Sisley observed a freight train chugging across the titular viaduct, emitting plumes of purple and pink smoke against the pale blue sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds. Several barges are moored along the edge of Seine, with long wooden planks used to convey people and cargo onto the shore: a bank of raw, clay-brown earth with a few scattered patches of bright green grass. The riverscape is largely dominated by the bridge. The choppy surface of the river is only visible between the bridge's thick stone piers, and the golden glow of the afternoon sun is mediated by its round arches.
For Sisley, like his fellow Impressionist landscape painters Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, bridges were important vectors of modern urban life; they enabled the rapid transportation of industrial materials and consumer products, as well as the daily commutes of bourgeois and working class people. Bridges also served as powerful compositional devices, providing solid geometric structure to modern landscape paintings. In Le viaduc d'Auteuil, unlike other examples in his oeuvre, Sisley arranged the bridge flat against the picture plane, contrasting its horizontal stone bulk with the more dynamic, transient elements of light, shadow, water, smoke, cloud, and foliage. Yet Sisley rendered the human figures, grass, river, bridge, and train alike with the same thick, loose brushstrokes.
Sisley painted the Auteuil viaduct in 1878, a little over a decade after it was built. Also known as Le pont du Point-du-Jour, the railway bridge was conceived as part of Napoleon III's plan to expand and modernize Paris in the mid-1860s. The resulting two-level stone structure represented the grandeur of the Second Empire, and was even marked by the imperial insignia—the circular outline of which is only loosely suggested in Sisley’s painting. The bridge suffered major damage during the Paris Commune in 1871 and was subsequently restored under the Third Republic.
By the late 1870s, the bridge once again facilitated the movement of both people and goods in the capital city by connecting the 15e and 16e arrondissements—specifically, the neighborhoods of Beaugrenelle and Auteuil, which are situated directly across the Seine from one another. The upper level of the bridge supported a train track of the Petite Ceinture railway, a predecessor of the twentieth-century Parisian Métro, which encircled the city—the artist then lived with his family in Sèvres, a Parisian suburb that was two train stops away from Auteuil. The lower level of the bridge, dominated by a barrel-vaulted enfilade, allowed both pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages to cross the bridge underneath the railway, and for boats to pass on the river below.
In 1878, Sisley was at a crossroads in his own career. The year before, he had submitted seventeen canvases to the third Impressionist exhibition in an apartment at 6 rue le Peletier, across the street from the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. Critics and collectors reacted with ambivalence to Sisley's work, so a month later, he and several other artists organized a public auction in order to generate additional sales. Efforts to organize a fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1878 stalled, and when the project was resurrected in early 1879, Sisley declined to participate, despite his enduring attachment to the Impressionist style. As the artist wrote to the journalist Theodore Duret, “The moment has come for me to make a decision. It is true that our exhibitions have served to make us known and in this they have been very useful to me, but I believe we must not isolate ourselves for too long. We are still far from the moment when we shall be able to do without the prestige attached to official exhibitions. I am, therefore, determined to submit to the Salon" (quoted in J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 421).
Sisley’s Le viaduc d'Auteuil was first acquired by Catholina Lambert (1834-1923), a New York silk manufacturer who amassed a major collection of Old Master and Modern paintings. Lambert owned at least nine canvases by Sisley, in addition to a dozen other Impressionist landscape pictures by Monet and Pissarro. In 1899, Lambert sold Le viaduc d'Auteuil to the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. The painting passed through several other private collections, including that of Jack Chrysler (1912-1958), a scion of the American automobile manufacturing family, before it was acquired by Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson from M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., in May 1951.