Works by Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley kept to landscape more steadily than any other Impressionist, painting outdoors along the Seine west of Paris, on the Thames near Hampton Court and at Moret-sur-Loing.

Sent to London at 18 to learn the family's import trade, he learned painting there above all, from J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, according to his biographer Gustave Geffroy. From 1861 he studied under Charles Gleyre in Paris with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, and the friends were soon painting out of doors. In Flood at Port-Marly, from 1872, a man poles a flat boat past a house where two women stand at the door, and a cloudy grey and blue sky fills more than half the canvas.

He went to London in 1874 with Jean-Baptiste Faure, an opera singer and his patron, and at East Molesey he painted the Thames by Hampton Court Bridge some twenty times. Under the Bridge of Hampton Court looks along the underside of the deck between heavy piers, with rowers sliding past on the left. In The Regatta at Molesey flags on a line, two of them British, swing across a green and grey sky.

Almost everything that follows is a painting, mostly of landscape, and a river runs through many of them. He also made some 100 pastels and drew on stone. In the pastel A Corner of Moret-sur-Loing, from 1895, white geese swim by a low bridge beside a pale gabled house; a lithograph of 1896, the bank of the Loing near Saint-Mammès, is printed in red-brown, with barges on the water and a dark stand of trees.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Building of the Winterthur Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay. Portrait: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.