Alfred Sisley (/ˈsɪsli/; French: [sislɛ]; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899)^[1] was a British-born French Impressionist landscape painter. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (outdoors); he deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.

Born to British parents, he spent most of his life in France. Among his important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton Court, executed in 1874, and landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing. The notable paintings of the Seine and its bridges in the former suburbs of Paris are, like many of his landscapes, characterised by tranquillity in pale shades of green, pink, purple, dusty blue, and cream. Over the years Sisley's power of expression and colour intensity increased.^[2]

Sisley was born in Paris^[a] on 30 October 1839, the youngest of four children of William Sisley^[b], an affluent merchant of imported luxury goods,^[c] and Felicia Sell.^[d] Little is known of Sisley's childhood in Paris, other than his education was bilingual (French and English).^[3]

At the age of 18 (in 1857) Sisley was sent to London to live and study with his English relatives for a career in the family import-export business. According to his confidante and biographer Gustave Geffroy, Sisley 'remained there for a few years, but above all learned painting from Turner and Constable, and literature from Shakespeare's plays.' Having shown no aptitude for business, Sisley returned to Paris in 1861.^[4]

From 1862, he studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts within the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together they would paint landscapes en plein air rather than in the studio in order to capture the transient effects of sunlight realistically. This approach, innovative at the time, resulted in paintings more colourful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work. Their paintings were usually rejected by the jury of the most important art exhibition in France, the annual Salon. During the 1860s, though, Sisley was in a better financial position than some of his fellow artists because he received an allowance from his father.

In 1866, Sisley began a relationship with Eugénie Lescouezec (1834–1898; usually known as Marie Lescouezec), a Breton living in Paris. The couple had two children: a son, Pierre, born in 1867 and a daughter, Jeanne, born in 1869.^[5] At the time, Sisley lived not far from Avenue de Clichy and the Café Guerbois, the gathering-place of many Parisian painters.

In 1868, his paintings were accepted at the Salon, but the exhibition did not bring him financial or critical success; nor did subsequent exhibitions.^[2]

In 1870, with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Sisley's father's business failed and the painter had to depend on the sale of his works as his sole means of support. For the remainder of his life he lived in poverty, as his paintings did not rise significantly in monetary value until after his death.^[6] Occasionally, however, Sisley would be backed by patrons, which allowed him, among other things, to make a few brief trips to Britain.

The first of these occurred in 1874 after the first independent Impressionist exhibition. The result of a few months spent southwest of London was a series of nearly twenty paintings of the non-tidal Thames at East Molesey and below its Hampton Court Bridge where the south bank becomes Thames Ditton, which was later described by art historian Kenneth Clark as "a perfect moment of Impressionism."

Until 1880, Sisley lived and worked in the country west of Paris, when he moved his family to a small village near Moret-sur-Loing, close to the forest of Fontainebleau where the painters of the Barbizon school had worked earlier in the century. Here, as art historian Anne Poulet has said, "the gentle landscapes with their constantly changing atmosphere were perfectly attuned to his talents. Unlike Monet, he never sought the drama of the rampaging ocean or the brilliantly colored scenery of the Côte d'Azur."^[7]

In 1881, Sisley made a second brief voyage to Great Britain.

In 1897, Sisley and his partner visited Britain again and finally were married in Wales at Cardiff Register Office on 5 August.^[8] They stayed at Penarth, where Sisley painted at least six oils of the sea and the cliffs. In mid-August they moved to the Osborne Hotel at Langland Bay on the Gower Peninsula, where he produced at least eleven oil paintings in and around Langland Bay and Rotherslade (then called Lady's Cove). They returned to France in October. This was Sisley's last voyage to his ancestral homeland. The National Museum Cardiff possesses two of his oil paintings of Penarth and Langland.

In 1898, Sisley applied for French citizenship, but was refused. A second application was made and supported by a police report, but illness intervened.^[9] Sisley remained a British national until his death.

Alfred Sisley died on 29 January 1899 of throat cancer in Moret-sur-Loing at the age of 59, a few months after the death of his wife.

Sisley's student works are lost. His first landscape paintings are sombre, coloured with dark browns, greens, and pale blues. They were often executed at Marly and Saint-Cloud. Little is known about Sisley's relationship with the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, which he may have seen in London, but some have suggested that these artists may have influenced his development as an Impressionist painter,^[10] as may have Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

He was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet.^[11] Among the Impressionists, Sisley has been overshadowed by Monet, whose work his resembles in style and subject matter, although Sisley's effects are more subdued.^[12] Described by art historian Robert Rosenblum as having "almost a generic character, an impersonal textbook idea of a perfect Impressionist painting",^[13] his work strongly invokes atmosphere, and his skies are always impressive. He concentrated on landscape more consistently than any other Impressionist painter.

Among Sisley's best-known works are Street in Moret and Sand Heaps, both owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing, shown at Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Allée des peupliers de Moret (The Lane of Poplars at Moret) has been stolen three times from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice – once in 1978 when on loan in Marseilles (recovered a few days later in the city's sewers), again in 1998 (when the museum's curator was convicted of the theft and jailed for five years with two accomplices), and finally in August 2007 (on 4 June 2008 French police recovered it and three other stolen paintings from a van in Marseilles).^[14]

A large number of fake Sisleys have been discovered. Sisley produced some 900 oil paintings, some 100 pastels and many other drawings.^[15]

During the Nazi period (1933–1945) a number of Sisley works were taken from Jewish art collectors by Nazis or their agents as part of the massive looting of Jews that preceded the Holocaust. On 18 June 2004 Sisley's Soleil de printemps, le Loing (1892) was restored to the family of Louis Hirsch, in a ceremony in Paris.^[16][17][18]

In 2008 a dispute erupted between Alain Dreyfus, an art dealer in Switzerland, and the auction house Christie's over a Sisley painting First Day of Spring in Moret, that was claimed by the Lindon family in court in Paris. Dreyfus said that Christie's had not sufficiently examined the work's history, or provenance, before putting it up for sale.^[19][20]

Also in 2008, the Sisley Bateaux en Réparation à Saint Mammès (1885) was recognised as having been looted by the Nazis and the subject of a settlement with the heirs of Benno and Frances Bernstein who had owned it before Nazi occupation.

Numerous Sisleys such as Winter Landscape were known to have been seized by the Nazi looting organisation known as the E.R.R. and still have not been found.^[21]

The German Lost Art Foundation has 24 listings for Sisley.^[22]

Significant retrospective exhibitions of Sisley's works include:

• Alfred Sisley (1992-1993) - Royal Academy of Arts, London: 3 July to 18 October 1992; Musée d'Orsay, Paris: 28 October 1992 to 31 January 1993; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: 14 March to 13 June 1993.^[23][24]

• Alfred Sisley retrospective (2000) - Isetan Museum, Tokyo: 2 March to 17 April 2000; Takamatsu City Art Museum, Kagawa: 22 April to 21 May 2000; Hiroshima Museum of Art: 27 May to 2 July 2000; The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama: 8 July to 10 September 2000.^[25]

• Sisley: Poet of Impressionism (2002-2003) - “Alfred Sisley: Poeta dell'Impressionismo” - Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara: 17 February to 19 May 2002; “Alfred Sisley: Poeta del Impresionismo” - Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid: 8 June to 15 September 2002; “Alfred Sisley: poète de l'impressionnisme” - Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon: 10 October 2002 to 6 January 2003.^[26][27][28]

• Sisley in England and Wales (2009) - National Gallery, London: 12 November 2008 to 22 February 2009; Amgueddfa Cymru / National Museum of Wales, Cardiff: 7 March to 14 June 2009.^[29][30]
• Alfred Sisley: the true Impressionist (2011-12) - "Alfred Sisley: der wahre Impressionist" Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal: 13 September 2011 to 29 January 2012.^[31][32]
• Alfred Sisley: Impressionist Master / Sisley l’impressionsite (2017) - “Alfred Sisley: Impressionist Master” - Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut: 21 January to 21 May 2017. ; “Sisley l’impressionsite” - Centre d’Art Aix-en-Provence, Caumont, Aix-en-Provence: 10 June to 15 October 2017. ^[33][34][35]

• Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La Celle-Saint-Cloud (1865)
• View of Montmartre from Cité des Fleurs to Les Batignolles (1869)
• The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872)
• Ferry to the Ile-de-la-Loge – Flood (1872)
• La Grande-Rue, Argenteuil (c. 1872)
• Square in Argenteuil (Rue de la Chaussee) (1872)
• Footbridge at Argenteuil [fr] (1872)
• Chemin de la Machine, Louveciennes (1873)
• Louveciennes. Sentier de la Mi-côte [fr] (1873)
• Hampton Court Bridge (painting) (1874)
• Molesey Weir – Morning (1874)
• Regatta at Molesey (1874)
• Under Hampton Court Bridge (1874)
• The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring (1875)
• The Small Meadows in Spring, By (c. 1881)

• 
  St. Martin Canal, 1870, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
• 
  The Seine at Argenteuil, 1872, Faure Museum, Aix-les-Bains
• 
  The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• 
  Grain fields on the hills of Argenteuil, 1873, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
• 
  Chemin de la Machine, Louveciennes, 1873, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
• 
  Fog, Voisins, 1874, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
• 
  La Petite Place - La Rue du Village, 1874, Aberdeen Art Gallery
• 
  Under the Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
• 
  The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, 1875, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
• 
  The Meadow, 1875, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• 
  The Seine at Bougival, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• 
  La Seine à Suresnes, 1880, Rehs Galleries, Inc., New York City
• 
  Le Givre à Veneux, 1880, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
• 
  A path at Les Sablons, 1883, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• 
  The Edge of Fontainebleau Forest, 1885, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
• 
  Women Going to the Woods, 1886, Artizon Museum, Tokyo
• 
  Le Pont de Moret, effet d'orage, 1887, Musée Malraux, Le Havre
• 
  Seaside, Langland, 1887, Museum of Fine Arts Bern
• 
  A Bend in the Loing, 1892, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
• 
  The Church at Moret in the Morning Sun, 1893, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen
• 
  A Forest Clearing, 1895, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

• Media related to Alfred Sisley at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Alfred Sisley at Wikiquote
• Alfred Sisley.org
• Paintings by Sisley
• "The Impressionists at Biography". Archived from the original on 6 March 2005. Retrieved 1 May 2005.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
• Impressionism : a centenary exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 12, 1974 – February 10, 1975, fully digitised text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art libraries