Alfred_Sisely\Articles

Articles

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

This concise biographical study of impressionist painter Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) is sparklingly illustrated with 74 superb color plates that capture his works' many moods. British journalist Couldrey is nicely attuned to the paintings' calmly mysterious radiance, their understatement, liberating sense of space and sheer enjoyment of nature. Sisley, born in Paris of English parents and with a French grandmother, "was neither English nor French--he was both," asserts the author, who applies this formula to his art and personality. Without adding significant new details to the life, her sensitive portrayal reveals a dignified artist, convinced of his true worth, stoically enduring disappointments and poverty. In her own understated way, Couldrey makes a strong case that Sisley, one of the least successful and lesser-known of the impressionists, was at the very heart of French impressionism as a prime force in the circle of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

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.

Using unpublished letters and archival documents, Shone ( The Post-Impressionists ) sheds new light on impressionist painter Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) in this engrossing, meticulously researched critical biography. It illuminates the artist's personal estrangement from his English parents who settled in Paris and embraced French bourgeois life. The evidence suggests that the penurious painter was cut off financially by his father, who apparently died insane after suffering business reversals. Sisley emerges here as a resourceful, proud, solitary figure. Shone also provides valuable details on Sisley's genteel poverty, his relations with dealers and fellow impressionists and his secluded later years in northern France. One can follow the distinct phases of Sisley's style in the 130 high-quality color plates and 40 black-and-whites. Indispensable for lovers of Sisley's luminous, healing art.