Alfred Sisley

Jeanne Dietsh-Sisley, Paris

French Art Galleries, New York

Gaston Nevins, New York

Mrs. Robert Foreman (acquired from the above and sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, May 3, 1973, lot 56)

Paul Kantor (acquired at the above sale)

B. Gerald Cantor, Beverly Hills

Acquired from the above in 1987

Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Maestros des Impressionismo, 1998-99 

Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Alfred Sisley, Poeta dell’impressionismo, 2002-03, no. 36

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members' Calendar 1987, Los Angeles, October 1987, p. 10

Richard Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, illustrated p. 115

Monet: The Seine and The Sea 1878-1883 (exhibition catalogue), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003, fig. 11, illustrated p. 22

If not for the plumes of smoke in the background, one might never guess that the site of this sunny landscape is the train station at Sèvres.  Only a few miles from the outskirts of Paris, Sèvres was fast becoming a suburban outpost, and the train station was the gateway to the city.   Since Sisley usually resisted glorifying the progress of industrialization and its indelible presence in the French countryside, it is not surprising that in this picture he has all but obscured the ‘iron horse’ behind the station, depicting only its steam as it evaporates into the greater expanse of the sky.  The artist painted the present work and another related picture of the same view (Daulte 301) in 1879, two years after Monet completed his famous series of depictions of the Saint-Lazare station in Paris.  Whereas Monet’s compositions give prominence to the soot and steel of the railroad, Sisley has relegated these urban offenses to the background, giving primary importance to the unspoiled beauty of the countryside.

Because of his own difficult financial situation as well as tensions among the Impressionist artists, Sisley chose to not submit his pictures to the 4^th Impressionist exhibition in the Spring of 1879.  Instead, he returned to the state-sanctioned Salon, where he hoped to reach a wider audience and eventually sell his pictures.   Sisley remained true to his commitment to developing his radical plein-air style, and he continued to produce landscapes that exemplified the original stylistic tenets of the Impressionist group.  The present picture, with its interweaving of color and dramatic interplay of light and shadow, demonstrates the artist’s steadfast devotion to Impressionist painting, even during the so-called ‘crisis-period’ of the late 1870s and early 1880s.