Alfred Sisley

Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above in January 1900)
Jules Strauss, Paris (acquired from the above in February 1900)
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above in March 1901)
Robert Sulzer, Winterthur (acquired from the above in December 1919)
Mrs Robert Sulzer, Winterthur (by descent from the above)
The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd.), London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1968. Sale: Christie's, New York, 7th May 2002, lot 22)
Richard Green Fine Paintings Ltd., London (purchased at the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2002

Paris, Durand-Ruel, Alfred Sisley, 1902, no. 29
Paris, Durand-Ruel, Tableaux par Monet, Pissarro, Renoir et Sisley, 1910, no. 82
Paris, Durand-Ruel, Tableaux par Sisley, 1914, no. 34
Winterthur, Kunstmuseum, Der unbekannte Winterthurer Privatbesitz I, 1942, no. 247

François Daulte, Alfred Sisley. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Lausanne, 1959, no. 843, illustrated

Painted in 1895, Lisière de fôret dates from the period when Sisley lived in Moret-sur-Loing, where he had settled in 1880, and which provided a perfect setting for the final decade of his life. Sisley cherished the beauty and quietness of Moret, which became an important source of inspiration. He took particular interest in the town’s Gothic church of Notre-Dame, a subject of a large series of paintings, as well as in the river Loing, with its multi-arched bridge lined with mills which he painted from a multitude of viewpoints. For the present work, however, Sisley chose to depict the edge of a forest on a bright summer day, with an almost cloudless sky and the sunrays bathing the entire scene in a warm glow.

 

The considerable attention with which he painted the play of light and shadow in the foliage, and the depiction of the trees in all their varieties, are a testament to the artist’s fascination with this subject. In a text that accompanied a Sisley retrospective exhibition held at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1897, Léon Roger-Milès wrote about the artist’s treatment of the subject of trees: ‘what he gives us are harmonies of trees in Nature: elements whose essence is variety, recording the seasons and the hours with all the colour effects that are proper to foliage […] he has analysed the sap that flows in them, and to render them he has extracted from his palette deep blues and old golds that span, between them, every note of the songs that they sing’ (quoted in Alfred Sisley (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. 212).