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.
Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Alfred Sisley remains one of the least known of the major Impressionists. Although a prolific artist, the uneven quality of his output has made it difficult to clearly establish his particular place within the history of Impressionism. A major international exhibition (of which this is the catalogue) opens in London in July 1992 before moving on to Baltimore and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. By concentrating on only the highest quality pictures from throughout his career, his contribution to the forging of Impressionism in the 1860s, his mastery of style in the 1870s and his resolution of the problems of technique in the 1880s are all explored and illustrated. In addition, his individual exploration of the idea of serial painting in the 1890s is also examined.
