Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley was a French-born artist of English descent who lived from 1839 to 1899. He was a founding member of the Impressionism art movement that swept through Paris in the late 19th century. Sisley never deviated from the original Impressionism group’s goals, only painting landscapes and always painting en plein air, and finding great satisfaction in doing so.
Alfred Sisley was born to a wealthy family who sent him to business school in London at 18 years old. After four years of business school, Sisley decided instead to become an artist, moving to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts.
While at art school, Sisley met Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the other artist friends of the group that would eventually form the Impressionism art movement. With these new friends, Sisley began painting en plein air, abandoning the studio and other academic techniques of art. After years of being rejected from the famous Paris Salon shows, in 1868, Sisley was finally accepted to exhibit his work, though it brought him neither fame nor fortune.
The onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 brought about the demise of his father’s silk business, which greatly affected Sisley’s livelihood, as his father was his only constant source of money. But Sisley remained devoted to his art and continued to pursue it full time. Living as a full-time artist overshadowed by Monet and Renoir during his lifetime, kept Sisley poor, but he never gave up and continued to paint solely for his income.
Unlike other impressionists, Sisley focused on landscapes, abstaining from figure studies. He preferred to paint en-plen air, capturing the fleeting landscape views as he saw them. He painted over 900 landscapes during his career as an artist. Unfortunately, Sisley remained poor for the rest of his life. Though his work never acquired great value until after his death, several patrons provided him with some money to travel for his work, which he did. He took several trips to Britain, and the paintings created from these excursions became his most well-known works. In 1889, Alfred Sisley died of throat cancer at age 59, just a few months after the death of his wife, Eugénie Lesouezec.
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