Art: Minor Master

To be a part of a great art movement has its risks as well as its rewards: while an artist may gain attention from the company he keeps, he may also suffer cruelly from the greatness of his betters. Such a man was Alfred Sisley, who was born to English parents in Paris, worked mostly in France, and is forever being measured against the great French impressionists. Last week Manhattan’s Paul Rosenberg & Co. opened a show of U.S.-owned Sisleys, and they served as a pleasant reminder that to be a minor master is not always a minor matter.

When in 1862 Sisley joined the class of the renowned Parisian teacher Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, two fellow students happened to be Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Monet disdained Gleyre, who once berated him for painting a model with all its deformities. “Nature, my friend, is all right as an element of study,” said Gleyre, “but it offers no interest. Style, you see, is everything.” By 1864, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and their fellow student Jean Bazille had settled down near Fontainebleau to paint nature as they saw fit.

It was in nearby Marlotte that Sisley painted his brooding street scene (see color). The impressionist’s concern with light and color was still some years off, but the painting is one of Sisley’s most moving. The worn and exhausted buildings have a canny geometry that locks the eye within the scene itself. The mood is melancholy yet resigned, like a long-suffering peasant’s sigh.

Sisley gradually moved away from this Courbet-like realism, and the work he did in the 1870s has usually been considered his best. In the Aqueduct at Marly his palette was open, his brush light and sure. Sisley never played rough with nature, nor did he like to intrude too far upon its secrets. While Monet atomized the sun, Sisley let it wash gently over his scenes, neither searing nor dazzling.

The brush for Sisley was not an instrument of attack or of dissection. What affected him in nature was not its force but its fragility. His paintings could be bright and gay, but almost never exuberant; they could portray sadness or loneliness, but never great grief. Sisley was drawn not to the powerful but to the perishable; he was moved not by stormy passion but by quiet poetry. His favorite part of any landscape, he said, was the sky: “It has the charm of things which disappear. And I love it particularly.”