“Sisley was first and foremost a painter of light. He knew how to imbue all of his paintings with it. One could say that light floods his landscapes, deliciously bathing even the most modest of details.”
E xecuted in 1889, Lisère de forêt au printemps is a test.mes nt to Alfred Sisley’s lifelong enchantment with the quaint village known as Moret-sur-Loing in north-central France. Though Sisley had visited the town on multiple occasions in the 1880s, it wasn’t until 1889 that he moved there permanently. With its rural terrain, medieval architecture, and scenic bridges, Moret-sur-Loing served as a site of boundless inspiration for the artist, who remained committed to the Impressionists’ maxim of painting en plein air to capture the atmospheric interplay of light and color of the French countryside. Sisley himself considered his work in Moret as some of his best, writing in 1892 to critic and journalist Adolphe Tavernier: “It is in Moret, amid this dense nature, with its tall poplars and beautiful, transparent, changing waters of the Loing...that my art has undoubtedly developed the most; especially in the last three years. I will never really leave this little place that is so picturesque” (Alfred Sisley, quoted in Exh. Cat., Greenwich, Bruce Museum (and traveling), Alfred Sisley: Impressionist Master, 2017, p. 162).
The body of works executed in Moret-sur-Loing in the last decade of Sisley’s life constitute a kind of ‘visual mapping’ of the picturesque village. Much like Monet’s faithful commitment to his garden at Giverny or the precipitous cliffs of Normandy, Sisley routinely returned to the banks of the river, the church at Moret, and the surrounding landscape to study and reproduce the ever-changing and multisensory conditions of a scene (fig.1,2) While many of his Moret compositions employ conventional framing devices to articulate panoramic townscapes or sweeping views of the countryside, Lisière de forêt au printemps is important in this body of work for its unique and comparatively modern perspective. In it, Sisley captures a meadow on the outskirts of the village, the viewer’s gaze partially shrouded by the branches of a flowering tree at the edge of the forest.
Fig. 3 (right) Alfred Sisley, Le Coup de vent, matin de mai, c.1890. Sold: Replica Shoes ’s, New York, 14 November 2022, lot 122 for $1,865,000
In brilliant daylight, Sisley renders the scene with gestural, agitated brushstrokes that establish compositional unity between the tall grasses of the field and the trees above. Even the branches are rendered with subtle and graceful curvature, contributing to the windswept, whimsical quality of the image. Painted in the springt.mes , Sisley conveys a sense of abundance and vitality in the natural world with various greens, blues, and yellows, remaining true to his ideal of raising the painting’s surface to its “highest pitch of liveliness.” (Sisley quoted in Rober Goldwater et al., eds., Artists on Art: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, London, 1976, pp.308-10). The scene is not devoid of human presence: to the left Sisley suggests a path leading to the village beyond, where one of its medieval buildings lingers in the distance. Framed picturesquely within the landscape, Sisley presents the building peeking out from the overgrowth, suggesting its inherent harmony with the natural world.
Discussing Sisley’s development for his seminal 1992 international retrospective, Christopher Lloyd asserts that the artist’s work of the late 1880s and early 90s “show him at the height of his powers. All the experience of the previous decades was blended in these canvases which amount to the summation of his output: the paint is richly applied with the impasto more pronounced than in previous works, the brushwork more insistently rhythmical, the execution more rapid, and the colors more vibrant.” (quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts (and traveling), Alfred Sisley, 1992, p. 25.) Indeed, Lisère de forêt au printemps pulsates with sunlit energy; the staccato passages of paint, delineating the leaves of the tree and the stalks of wheat billowing in the breeze, come alive beneath the artist’s touch, their effortless vitality serving as a reminder of Sisley’s lasting legacy as one of the finest landscape painters of the Impressionists.