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Lot Essay
Alfred Sisley has long been recognized as a pre-emininent landscape painter. Fellow painter Camille Pissarro described Sisley as "a great and beautiful artist, in my opinion he is a master equal to the greatest." When Matisse asked Pissarro "What is an Impressionist?" he replied, "An Impressionist is a painter who never paints the same picture, who always paints a new picture...Cézanne is not an impressionist painter because all his life he has been painting the same picture. He has never painted sunlight, he always paints grey weather." Pissarro's response prompted Matisse's final question, "Who is a typical Impressionist?", to which Pissarro made only one reply, "Sisley" (quoted in C. Lloyd, op. cit., p. 8).
In the present work, the predominance of the sky and the reflections in the river evidence Sisley's interest in the effects of changing atmospheric conditions; in which the fleeting moment of time within a landscape is caught through overlapping layers of subtle tones of greens, greys and blues.
As Christopher Lloyd commented on the artist's paintings from this period:
The group of paintings by Sisley dating from the 1870s are subject to the strictest pictorial organization. It is this compositional aspect, in addititon to their facture that makes these paintings, in comparison with landscapes by artists of the Barbizon school, specifically modern. Sisley incorporates an almost relentless array of horizontals, verticals and diagonals deployed as plunging perspectives and flat bands of planar divisions. Yet, Sisley, more so in many cases than even Pissarro and Monet, was more radical than any of his sources, since he seeks to bring order to a world in an ever incresing state of flux. The depiction of modernity was best served by a resolute style derived from astute visual analysis and confident technique (C. Lloyd, "Alfred Sisley and the Purity of Vision", Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992).
In the present work, the predominance of the sky and the reflections in the river evidence Sisley's interest in the effects of changing atmospheric conditions; in which the fleeting moment of time within a landscape is caught through overlapping layers of subtle tones of greens, greys and blues.
As Christopher Lloyd commented on the artist's paintings from this period:
The group of paintings by Sisley dating from the 1870s are subject to the strictest pictorial organization. It is this compositional aspect, in addititon to their facture that makes these paintings, in comparison with landscapes by artists of the Barbizon school, specifically modern. Sisley incorporates an almost relentless array of horizontals, verticals and diagonals deployed as plunging perspectives and flat bands of planar divisions. Yet, Sisley, more so in many cases than even Pissarro and Monet, was more radical than any of his sources, since he seeks to bring order to a world in an ever incresing state of flux. The depiction of modernity was best served by a resolute style derived from astute visual analysis and confident technique (C. Lloyd, "Alfred Sisley and the Purity of Vision", Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992).