Alfred Sisley French, 1839-1899

Alfred Sisley was born in Paris to an English merchant family and initially travelled to London at eighteen to study commerce. After several years he abandoned business and returned to Paris in 1862 to pursue painting, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts and studying in the studio of Marc Gleyre, where he formed close friendships with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.

Although his earliest landscapes date from the mid-1860s, Sisley’s career was shaped by the financial collapse of his family following the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, after which painting became his sole source of income. He devoted himself almost entirely to landscape, working along the Seine at Bougival, Louveciennes and Marly-le-Roi before settling in Moret-sur-Loing in 1882, where he remained until his death in 1899. The medieval town, its bridges and the River Loing became recurring motifs in his later paintings.

Sisley exhibited in four of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Despite the support of the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, his work attracted relatively few buyers during his lifetime. In 1897 a major retrospective was held at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, yet none of the works sold. His landscapes are now regarded as central to the development of Impressionism and are held in major museum collections worldwide.