Lady’s Cove before the Storm

Sisley was born in Paris to English parents, kept his British passport his whole life, and painted French rivers almost exclusively. He met Monet, Renoir and Bazille in Gleyre’s studio in the early 1860s, and of that group he was the one who never really moved on from landscape. No portraits to speak of. Almost no figure work. Just water, poplars, snow, flooded streets, and an obsessive attention to sky, which usually takes up more than half the canvas. His father’s business collapsed during the Franco-Prussian war and Sisley spent the rest of his life short of money, which is part of why the late work concentrates on Moret-sur-Loing, the small town near Fontainebleau where he settled and painted the same church and the same bridge over and over in different weather. Recognition arrived after he died, which is a cliché except that in his case it is simply what happened. Prices for his work rose sharply within a few years of his death in 1899.