Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Alfred Sisley was a French-born English Impressionist landscape painter who was born, and spent most of his life, in France. Sisley is generally recognized as the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air.

Among his most important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton, executed in 1874, and various landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing.

Sisley was born in Paris to affluent English parents. In 1857, at the age of 18, he was sent to London to study for a career in business, but he abandoned it after four years and returned to Paris in 1861. Beginning in 1862 he studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts within the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together they would paint landscapes en plein air rather than in the studio, in order to realistically capture the transient effects of sunlight. This approach, innovative at the time, resulted in paintings more colorful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing.

Sisley's work strongly invokes atmosphere and his skies are always very impressive. His concentration on landscape subjects was the most consistent of any of the Impressionists. Among Sisley's best-known works are Street in Moret and Sand Heaps, both owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing shown at Musée d'Orsay, Paris.