Alfred Sisley was born in Paris to bourgeois British parents, his father, a merchant trading with the American southern states. Sisley received an excellent education, even studying English and business in London, but finding this unpalatable he returned to Paris where his family gave him every support, his father arranged for the twenty-three year old to enter the studio of the history painter Charles Gleyre in 1862.
Fellow students of Gleyre included Pierre Renoir and Claude Monet, their friendship was to revolutionize painting and radically change the history of art. Though none of the four felt a particular affinity for the highly academic and somewhat pedantic Gleyre, it was young Monet’s personality-clash with the master that resulted in the group leaving the studio and setting out on their own. Inseparable for a time, the group traveled and painted together, Sisley’s early style being particularly influenced by the oil paintings of Corot and Courbet whom he met while working around Paris with his companions, Sisley painted in the French countryside with Renoir. In 1866, his first year at the Paris Salon, he was received as a student of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. By this time, however, he had started to frequent the Café Guerbois, and was becoming more deeply influenced by the notions which were creating Impressionism.
Alfred Sisley returned to England from 1870 to 1871 (during the Franco-Prussian War) where he exhibited and again in 1874. Having been financially supported by his family and never worrying about having to earn his living as an artist, Sisley was shocked to learn upon the death of his father that the family business lay in ruins as a result of the war and Sisley, with a family to support, was reduced to a state of poverty, in which he was to stay until virtually the end of his life. Sisley, for the first time, was forced to paint with a commercial mind-set, selling landscape oil paintings for fifty Francs each in order to support his family. The Exposition Indépendantes, the first Impressionist show that so affected the course of modern art, contained no less than twenty one oil canvases by Sisley. Though the show caused quite a scandal and generated a lot of press, though most of it negative, the subsequent sale, run by Paul Durand-Ruel ,who he was introduced by Camille Pissarro, resulted in the artist’s twenty-one oil paintings bringing in only a little over two thousand Francs, a bitter disappointment for Sisley.
Unfortunately, he did not fair much better at the exhibition of 1876, two years later. Few of the Impressionists endured the hardships that befell Sisley, who was reduced at one point to selling reproduction copies of Rousseau’s paintings and his own canvases for twenty-five Francs. Lacking a wealthy family, a condition that enabled the rest of the Impressionists to paint, Sisley depended on the kindness of friends to get by. Sisley and Renoir often found a table at the restaurant owned by M. Murer, a great lover of painting, who good-heartedly accepted Sisley’s oil paintings as payment for meals at his establishment. Without his generosity Sisley would have starved.
France’s economic crisis strongly affected the art world in Paris, making it especially difficult for artists painting in a new radical style to find support and art patrons. Even Durand-Ruel, struggling with his own financial problems, abandoned his painter friends for a time. During these hard years, Sisley stayed outside of Paris, choosing instead the city’s suburbs where he could get by on less money. Perhaps a blessing in disguise, these surroundings provided the rich subject matter of his landscape oil paintings.
His work had by this time achieved complete independence from the early influences that had affected him. In the 1870s he produced a remarkable series of landscapes of Argenteuil, where he was living, one of which, The Bridge at Argenteuil (1872, Brooks Memorial Gallery) was bought by Edouard Manet. Towards the end of the decade Claude Monet was beginning to have a considerable influence on him and a series of landscape paintings of the area around Paris, including Marly, Bougival and Louveciennes. Having painted the views of the regions outside Paris in the 1870’s, Sisley in the 80’s moved southward to paint landscapes around Moret-sur-Loing. It was also in the 1880’s that Sisley began to sell more of his artwork, with the help of the dealer Durand-Ruel, who put on a successful exhibition in New York, where there was a new interest in the Impressionists. He was considered to be something of a misanthrope, especially in his later years, feuding with Monet and breaking with Durand-Ruel, to whom he had owed his earliest success. Despite his early hardships and persistent moods, Sisley eventually achieved a considerable reputation but it was won at a high price and he had little time to enjoy it, dying at the age of 60.
From his early admiration for Corot he retained a passionate interest in the sky, which nearly always dominates his paintings and also in the effects of winter snow, the two interests often combining to create a strangely dramatic effect. Naturally different, he did not promote himself in the way that some of his fellow Impressionists did and it was only towards the end of his life, when he was dying of cancer of the throat, that he received something approaching the recognition he deserved. He was one of the creators of French Impressionism, changing the course of art in the 19th century and beyond and one of the worlds artists.
View all the sisley oil painting art reproductions.
John Singer Sargent
Theodore Clement Steele
Return to the famous world artist biography home page.
Every oil painting reproduction is a 100% hand painted oil painting on canvas done in the traditional manner.
Alfred Sisley, French art, art museum reproduction oil painting reproductions, art reproduction oil painting, famous art artwork copy oil paintings reproductions, famous artist painters reproduction oil painting art reproductions oil paintings, replica oil paintings, oil painting replicas, wholesale oil painting art reproductions, Impressionist oil paintings, modern art, countryside landscapes oil paintings, The Bridge at Argenteuil, snow on the road, the bridge at moret, impressionism oil paintings, winter snow oil paintings, bridge oil paintings, Alfred Sisley biography
