.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Le pont de Moret-sur-Loing en été is a visual testament to the charm and pictorial possibilities that Alfred Sisley found in Moret-sur-Loing, the picturesque, medieval town southeast of Paris that was to become his home. Painted in 1888, the foreground of the scene is given over to the shimmering waters of the Loing and the verdant riverbank. With his luminous palette, Sisley has captured the warmth and light of a summer's day. A spike of dark reeds in the lower right foreground mark the spot where the artist stood to paint. Lissom poplars extend upwards, and in the background, Moret’s architecture frames this peaceful world. The arches of the titular bridge are rhythmic in their regularity, interrupted midway by the Provenchar mill. Above, the balmy summer sky is strewn with feathery clouds. ‘It is at Moret,’ Sisley wrote to the critic Adolphe Tavernier in 1892, ‘in this thickly wooded countryside with its tall poplars, the waters of the river Loing here, so beautiful, so translucent, so changeable; at Moret my art has undoubtedly developed the most. I will never really leave this little place that is so picturesque’ (quoted in R. Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, p. 123).
Throughout his career, Sisley remained staunchly committed to the landscape tradition, aligning himself with the Barbizon School and such artists as Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet, all figures who ‘have loved Nature and felt it strongly’ (A. Sisley quoted in Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of London, 1992, p. 212). Yet despite this conviction, Sisley nevertheless experimented with the genre’s conventions. He regularly upended his representation of pictorial space by inserting trees to destabilise a painting’s depth, and over the course of the 1880s, he intensified his palette, shifting towards brighter, more radiant tonalities, as seen in the yellow and lime green grasses that line the river of the present work. His brushwork, already fractured, continue to loosen resulting in tapestry-like paintings of woven colour.
Within Sisley’s oeuvre, bridges were both a frequent motif and a device he used to structure a scene. He painted several views of those in Argenteuil and Villeneuve-la-Garenne as well as the bridge at Hampton Court, and in the last decade of his life, he turned his attention towards the bridge at Moret-sur-Loing. The arched crossing connected the centre of town with the road to Saint-Mammès, where Sisley often painted. In addition to its representation in Le pont de Moret-sur-Loing en été, Sisley painted the bridge on more than a dozen occasions that same year. Across these compositions, he varied his viewpoint, capturing different times of day and different seasons in an effort to record the immediacy of his responses to the ever-changing conditions of a particular place. Sisley would return again to the theme in 1890, and works from both series are held in museums worldwide.
Sisley had first relocated to the remote region from the Paris suburbs in 1880. With his partner Eugénie and their children Jeanne and Pierre, he found a house in Veneux-Nadon. Two years later, he moved about two miles away to Moret, which he described enthusiastically in a letter to Monet, then house-hunting as well: ‘Moret is just two hours journey from Paris, and has plenty of places to let at six hundred to a thousand francs. There is a market once a week, a pretty church, and beautiful scenery round about. If you were thinking of moving, why not come and see?’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1992, p. 184).
Throughout his career, Sisley remained staunchly committed to the landscape tradition, aligning himself with the Barbizon School and such artists as Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet, all figures who ‘have loved Nature and felt it strongly’ (A. Sisley quoted in Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of London, 1992, p. 212). Yet despite this conviction, Sisley nevertheless experimented with the genre’s conventions. He regularly upended his representation of pictorial space by inserting trees to destabilise a painting’s depth, and over the course of the 1880s, he intensified his palette, shifting towards brighter, more radiant tonalities, as seen in the yellow and lime green grasses that line the river of the present work. His brushwork, already fractured, continue to loosen resulting in tapestry-like paintings of woven colour.
Within Sisley’s oeuvre, bridges were both a frequent motif and a device he used to structure a scene. He painted several views of those in Argenteuil and Villeneuve-la-Garenne as well as the bridge at Hampton Court, and in the last decade of his life, he turned his attention towards the bridge at Moret-sur-Loing. The arched crossing connected the centre of town with the road to Saint-Mammès, where Sisley often painted. In addition to its representation in Le pont de Moret-sur-Loing en été, Sisley painted the bridge on more than a dozen occasions that same year. Across these compositions, he varied his viewpoint, capturing different times of day and different seasons in an effort to record the immediacy of his responses to the ever-changing conditions of a particular place. Sisley would return again to the theme in 1890, and works from both series are held in museums worldwide.
Sisley had first relocated to the remote region from the Paris suburbs in 1880. With his partner Eugénie and their children Jeanne and Pierre, he found a house in Veneux-Nadon. Two years later, he moved about two miles away to Moret, which he described enthusiastically in a letter to Monet, then house-hunting as well: ‘Moret is just two hours journey from Paris, and has plenty of places to let at six hundred to a thousand francs. There is a market once a week, a pretty church, and beautiful scenery round about. If you were thinking of moving, why not come and see?’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1992, p. 184).