Alfred Sisley

After the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871, Sisley decided to move with his family to the village of Louveciennes, situated on the river Seine, about thirty kilometres west of the capital. In the autumn of the following year, he rented a small two-storey house at 2, rue de la Princesse, where he stayed until 1874. Sisley lived near the house occupied by Renoir, one of his closest friends at the time, and the two men would often set off together to paint the countryside around them. Pissarro, too, had lived there since 1869. It was probably the company of his fellow artists, as much as the beauty and convenient location of the region, that drew Sisley to the village of Louveciennes.

During his time there, Sisley painted a number of scenes of the village, its winding streets and tree-lined roads (fig. 1), and often went for long walks to the neighbouring Villeneuve-la-Garenne, Argenteuil and Ile de la Grande-Jatte, exploring the region in search for new subjects. This new setting provided Sisley with a new creative impetus and, once settled, he started working with fresh energy. He explored the beauty of the Seine valley, and took delight in painting this new environment, trying to capture the effects of season, weather and time of day on the countryside, and experimenting with the effects of light and colour. While other Impressionist painters such as Monet and Renoir preferred to depict summery scenes and sunny landscapes, it was Sisley and Pissarro who discovered the wintry scenery in the Louveciennes region, and took pleasure in painting the streets, houses and trees covered in snow (figs. 2-4).

Writing about Sisley’s landscapes executed during his stay at Louveciennes in the early 1870s, Vivienne Couldrey commented: "Sisley first began to paint snow scenes at this time, attracted by the strange lights and colours of the snow which was never simply white, and by the way snow transformed a landscape, gave an amazing stillness that was ethereal, other-worldly. Something in Sisley responded to the melancholy of the bare trees, the frozen countryside, the special silence of snow. His choice of subject is still the road to the village between walls or trees or curving away between houses, and the subtle colouring of the sky, with the snow bright on the rooftops or shadowed under the bare trees" (V. Couldrey, Alfred Sisley, The English Impressionist, Exeter, 1992, pp. 41 & 44).

The house on the right of the present composition is the one that was occupied by Sisley and his family on a bend of the gently descending rue de la Princesse. The street was bordered on one side by the park belonging to the château of Madame du Barry, a mistress of Louis XV, who had lived at Louveciennes in the second half of the 18^th century, and on the other side by cottages, orchards and vegetable gardens. In 1873-74 Sisley executed a number of paintings of the house, as well as views from its first floor balcony. Route à Louveciennes reflects the artist’s fascination with the simple, quiet charm of the street covered in snow, its blue undertones conveying the icy winter air. Here, the subtle pink glow of the sky indicates dusk, and as the darkness of the winter evening settles upon the village, the only visible signs of life are the two figures in the doorway.

Fig. 1, Alfred Sisley, Chemin de la machine, Louveciennes, 1873, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Fig. 2, Alfred Sisley, Neige à Louveciennes – Chemin de l’Etarché, 1874, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 3, Alfred Sisley, Neige à Louveciennes, 1874, oil on canvas, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Fig. 4, Camille Pissarro, Châtaigniers à Louveciennes, circa 1872, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris