.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Comité Sisley has confirmed the authenticity of this work. This work will be included in the new edition of the catalogue raisonné of Alfred Sisley by François Daulte, being prepared at the Galerie Brame & Lorenceau by the Comité Sisley.
Sisley moved to Marly-le-Roi, a small town close to the Seine on the western side of Paris, at the beginning of 1875. The preceding year had seen the staging of the first Impressionist group exhibition, as well as a few promising prices for Impressionist pictures at auction. Nonetheless, the wider public remained largely unconvinced by the Impressionist experiment and Sisley's move to Marly was, in part, with a view to save money on living expenses away from the costs of Paris.
In an effort to further improve his precarious financial position, soon after his move to Marly, Sisley, in collaboration with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, mounted an auction in an effort to sell their own works--at that time a very unusual move for artists. The sale, held in March 1875 and including seventy-three paintings of which twenty-one were by Sisley, met with little success. Although this was a period of significant financial hardship for Sisley and his family, it was also a period of unmatched creative success. To quote Christopher Lloyd, "During the years when Sisley lived in Marly-le-Roi and Sèvres, he painted some of the finest pictures in his oeuvre" (Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 149).
In the present work, painted in 1877, 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, grays and blues. The artist wrote to his friend Adolphe Tavernier, "You see that I am an advocate of a diversity of treatment in the same picture. This is certainly not a generally held opinion, but I think I am right, especially when it is a question of rendering the effect of light. For although sunlight softens some parts of the landscape, it highlights others, and these light effects which express themselves almost physically in nature should be rendered physically on the canvas. Objects should be painted with their own texture, moreover, and above all, they should be bathed in light just as they are in nature. That's what has to be achieved" (quoted in ibid., p. 219).
Sisley moved to Marly-le-Roi, a small town close to the Seine on the western side of Paris, at the beginning of 1875. The preceding year had seen the staging of the first Impressionist group exhibition, as well as a few promising prices for Impressionist pictures at auction. Nonetheless, the wider public remained largely unconvinced by the Impressionist experiment and Sisley's move to Marly was, in part, with a view to save money on living expenses away from the costs of Paris.
In an effort to further improve his precarious financial position, soon after his move to Marly, Sisley, in collaboration with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, mounted an auction in an effort to sell their own works--at that time a very unusual move for artists. The sale, held in March 1875 and including seventy-three paintings of which twenty-one were by Sisley, met with little success. Although this was a period of significant financial hardship for Sisley and his family, it was also a period of unmatched creative success. To quote Christopher Lloyd, "During the years when Sisley lived in Marly-le-Roi and Sèvres, he painted some of the finest pictures in his oeuvre" (Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 149).
In the present work, painted in 1877, 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, grays and blues. The artist wrote to his friend Adolphe Tavernier, "You see that I am an advocate of a diversity of treatment in the same picture. This is certainly not a generally held opinion, but I think I am right, especially when it is a question of rendering the effect of light. For although sunlight softens some parts of the landscape, it highlights others, and these light effects which express themselves almost physically in nature should be rendered physically on the canvas. Objects should be painted with their own texture, moreover, and above all, they should be bathed in light just as they are in nature. That's what has to be achieved" (quoted in ibid., p. 219).