4 January 2022
the artist has fallen in love
This painting by Alfred Sisley at the Met has always haunted me. It’s entitled The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes, 1879. When I lived in NY I used to up to the Met on Friday evenings when it was open late. On my peregrinations there, I often stopped to look at this picture that drove me crazy. Looking at it today, again, it still does. It takes me right back to the French countryside on an Autumn afternoon.
Google tells me that Sisley made 471 paintings in his lifetime. Not a great deal compared to what so many contemporary artists crank out these days, but it’s a different world now, faster and less discerning perhaps. Sisley spent long hours on each picture outdoors, preferring to finish his work on the motif unlike other Impressionists who would return back to the studio.
He was an exceptionally modern painter who survived the dusty, dogmatic schooling of the Beaux Arts in Paris. He said something that moves me still regarding painters and their work; ...“every picture reveals a specific place in it which the artist has fallen in love”. What a lovely way of expressing something so personal that only another painter would understand it. I agree wholeheartedly but would add that a painter can love specific places in a picture for any number of reasons too. Places that caused grief because it has been worked over and over, or place where an angel has passed overhead and serendipitously left brushstrokes that trace the divine. There will even be mistakes that reveal sparks of the painter’s authenticity. He also said; “I like all those painters who have a strong feeling for Nature”. Ditto for me, that’s for sure. After all these years, my love for the sea and sky has only grown precisely because I’ve been painting it.
This painting of his has a tactile and spontaneous application of the paint which means that hidden under his British reserve, there was also a passionate Frenchman. He was in fact, a dual national.
For me personally, what I hadn’t learned already from Vincent Van Gogh’s visceral sensuality, I learned from this modest picture because before he came on the scene, Alfred Sisley’s picture seemed to manifest for me all the elements in it as real living entities. It had nothing to do withe Cezanne or the Impressionists.
Nor did it have anything to do with the world of permanence so often evoked in Cézanne’s austere but sketchy pictures. This is a sky of stormy emotions, one that erupts, then dissipates within hours like young children at play.
It feels to me like a late autumnal landscape painted just before the November chill, but it’s just a feeling I've always had. The large tree on the left, (in the relative foreground) wiggles and writhes like an old oak resisting the change of seasons; holding on, and holding off with persistence to its very last leaves. The tree to the right across the road in the wintry rose-colored field might be an elm, or maybe a mulberry, who knows? But unlike the great oak to the left, this tree has accepted its fate and surrendered its colour. I love that it has been rendered with an airiness of touch, painted perhaps with a rough hog’s hair brush then scratched out with the hard wooden end of it even. Its faded leaves are a lovely grey and already, winter lives in its branches. Threadbare, one can almost see through it.
If one covers the entire foreground below the horizon line, one would be left with a picture of a sky and trees for the most part, and it might even suddenly appear to have been painted by Pierre Bonnard, a Bonnard in a big hurry though. But writing this, and looking at it continually, I might amend that, and say that maybe the entire painting could have been done by Bonnard, even if the foreground feels more like Sisley. The tree (aforementioned on the left) feels so Bonnard! It’s hard to describe just why, but it has something to do with the utter lack of pretension in it. It's painted with wild, childlike freedom, so charismatically Pierre Bonnard. Sisley, it seems to me, was more of a technician than Bonnard but that it not a slight to either of them. In fact, this picture is rather atypical for Sisley, who was usually a smooth operator with a flawless sense of 'classical' drawing. Sisley's Impressionism is bright and clean, not absent of poetry, but just more structured. He was usually more loyal perhaps to the earlier tenets of Degas’s visual clarity, barely 30 years ahead of the younger, more pictorially modern and adventurous Pierre Bonnard.
In any event, every painter has at least a few treasured favourites living in their own deep colourful vaults of memory, and this is one of my own.
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