Alfred Sisley
(Mary Anne Stevens (Editor))
Sisley (1839-1899) remains perhaps the least appreciated of the major Impressionists, partly because of his Anglo-French background. Born into an English family that had settled in France two generations earlier, he lived in wretched poverty and critical neglect, dying of throat cancer at age 60. Wedding 100 color plates and 100 black-and-whites to erudite essays by six scholars, this beautiful album catalogues a major retrospective that opened at London's Royal Academy, moved to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and will travel to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. The contributors emphasize Sisley's purity of vision, his radical compositional experiments and his debts to Constable, Corot and Courbet. Today, paradoxically, some critics see Sisley's unswerving allegiance to impressionism beyond 1870 as a severe limitation, but this study refutes that interpretation by underscoring his modernist subject matter and technique. Stevens is librarian of the Royal Academy. [From Publishers Weekly]
Sisley
(Richard Shone, Alfred Sisley
)
A survey of the life and work of Alfred Sisley, one of the leading exponents of the Impressionist movement. The text examines how Sisley's painting life was devoted to the landscape. The author examines the tonal balance of such celebrated paintings as the snow-scenes of the Paris suburbs, views of the flooded Seine at Port-Marly and the colourful regattas on the Thames. The author recognizes that full recognition for the artist and his work only began after his relatively early death and argues that even now, his work is unjustifiably neglected. In studying Sisley's artistic development, the artist's English nationality, early career, struggle to earn a living, and secluded later years are examined.
