Exhibitions
Alfred Sisley
(Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, till 6 Jan)
Offbeat Impressionist
Nicholas Powell
There are waters so chilly and choppy you fumble for your wellies, snows so icily blue they feel like an icebox: far from being the most famous of Impressionists Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), an English artist who spent most of his career painting in the western and south-eastern suburbs of Paris, was one of the best. The Musee des BeauxArts in France's second city, Lyon, has devised a clever policy of staging exhibitions devoted to excellent but less celebrated artists — last year it was the turn of Albert Gleizes (1881-1953). a Cubist so much more engaging and inspired than the gloomy, repetitive Georges Braque. And now it is the turn of Sisley, represented by more than 70 canvases from museums all over the world. Just a few are the sort that always crop up on calendars. Most, however, are very little known.
Sisley's relative obscurity has been due not only to economic and psychological factors — he was extremely shy and perpetually broke, especially after his father was ruined by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and virtually no archive material concerning him has survived — but also to the fact he chose offbeat subjects — mundane views and unusual viewpoints, which he turned into compositions of great beauty.
He enjoyed out-of-the-ordinary light effects, too — the slanting light of early morning and early evening, the muted sun of winter days. But there are no townscapes in Sisley's opus, no landscapes of the grand, sun-drenched Claude Monet variety, no portraits and indeed very few human figures at all — just occasional squidgy characters, used to stop the eye from wandering, or to give an idea of scale and perspective.
Only 17 works painted by Sisley before 1870, when his studio was destroyed by Prussian troops, have survived and Lyon has five of them. The unusually large format (129 ems by 208 ems) `Allee de Chataigniers La Celle-Saint-Cloud' of 1865, Sisley's first dated canvas, is pure Barbizon school, all blazing blue sky, deep massed foliage and rugged rocks. And a similarly leafy 'All& de Chataigniers La Celle-Saint-Cloud' painted two years later could almost have been done by Corot. But Sisley becomes his own man with his `Vue de Montmartre depuis la Cite des Fleurs aux Batignolles of 1869' — a view of Paris's most famous hill from the then largely undeveloped 17th arrondissement. The sky (Sisley always began by painting the sky) is one of those overcast, non-committal Paris affairs and a cluster of buildings is visible across a bright-green band of foreground grass planted with skinny saplings. The view is as unusual and as utterly unromantic as the composition is tight and harmonious. It must have been most shocking at the time.
Sisley was so good at ice and snow which he rendered fresh-fallen or dank and slushy. His `Effet de Neige a Louveciennes', 1874, is a study of snow in white and blue under a clear sky. By playing on blues in a radically different way in `L'Abreuvoir a Marly-leRoi — Gelee blanche' Sisley produces a crisp, altogether icier feel.
Water was where Sisley's virtuosity really came into play and, like many virtuosi, he makes it seem so simple. Widespread flooding of towns and villages to the north-west of Paris in the 1870s gave Sisley all sorts of excuses to compose landscapes in which the very notions of wet and dry, land and river, were all topsy-turvy. His 'Le Pont de SaintMammes', 1881, is two-thirds sky, under
which we find three successive bands the far riverbank with poplar trees, the river and the near riverbank. The composition is held together by the reflection of the poplars in the river, which Sisley rendered by painting a virtual mirror-image of his trees, in much the same greens, and then painting occasional squiggles of blue on top. The illusion is as perfect as it is audacious.
During his later years, Sisley appears to have been groping around for new paths. His brushstrokes got wilder, his light effects more dramatic and his compositions came under the influence of then fashionable Japanese prints. Between 1893 and 1894, while Monet was working on his Rouen cathedral series, Sisley was studying different light effects on the church of Moret
sur-Loing — fittingly, a more modest but no less interesting a monument than that chosen by his eminent colleague and lifelong friend.
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