ALFRED SISLEY

(1839-1899)

La Seine à Suresnes

Footnotes

Provenance
Wilhelm Hansen Collection, Copenhagen.
Kōjirō Matsukata Collection, Kobe and Paris (acquired from the above in 1923); on deposit with Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, no. 40.
Thence by descent; their sale, Sotheby's, New York, May 15, 1984, lot 15C.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature
F. Daulte, Alfred Sisley, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Lausanne, 1959, no. 313 (illustrated).
The Bridgestone Museum of Art (eds.), The Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1977, no. 40 (illustrated).
S. Brame & F. Lorenceau, Alfred Sisley, Catalogue critique des peintures et des pastels, Paris, 2021, no. 342 (illustrated pp. 151 & 447).



La Seine à Suresnes marks a farewell to the Parisian suburbs, where Alfred Sisley had been living for several years at the time he painted it. Within a few months he would move to a small village near Moret-sur-Loing, 75 kilometers southwest of the French capital, where he spent the final two decades of his life.

The canvas depicts the River Seine as it winds its way through Suresnes, a suburban commune just west of Paris, bordering the Bois de Boulogne. At the time, Sisley was living in nearby Sèvres with his long-term partner Eugénie and their two children.

The artist turned 40 in the year he executed La Seine à Suresnes, and at this point of his career was especially fascinated by the fugitive aspects of light and atmosphere. The canvas is filled with dabbed, gestural brushstrokes, most noticeably in the section marking the surface of the river. This avant-garde painting boasts all the hallmarks of a great Impressionist landscape: particularly the reflection of light on the water and the filtering of light through the clouds.

Sisley painted another version of this view early in 1880 – a picture of the same name, which today forms part of the National Galleries of Scotland's collection in Edinburgh. However, where that painting captures the chill of winter, the present work is of Suresnes in autumn, as witnessed by the brownish tinge to the leaves on the trees.

Sisley was fond of a compositional device in which a river, path or road curves into the distance, enticing viewers to follow its course. La Seine à Suresnes is a prime manifestation. Various figures can be seen dotted along the left of the riverbank as it recedes from view, including a horseman and his cart in the foreground. On the horizon beyond them is a group of factories emitting smoke.

More than half of the picture is taken up by the sky. This was no accident. Sisley stressed the importance of this element in his oeuvre, telling the art critic Adolphe Tavernier in 1892: "The sky cannot be a mere background. On the contrary, it not only helps to add depth through its planes (for the sky has planes just as the ground does); it also gives movement through its shape, and by its arrangement in relation to the effect or composition of the picture... I always start a painting with the sky" (Alfred Sisley quoted in A. Tavernier, L'Atelier de Sisley, exh. cat., Paris, 1907 in Richard Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, p. 218).

His reference to the sky as the starting point for his pictures reveals the artist's affinity with the work of John Constable, the influence of whose cloudscapes set Sisley somewhat apart from his fellow Impressionists. In La Seine à Suresnes, the sky is packed with a marvelous mixture of cloud formations: some wispy, some substantial, some purple, some pink, some mixed with the smoke from the factory chimneys, and all reflected in a subtle range of tones on the shimmering surface of the river. The novelist and art critic, Gustave Geffroy, went so far as to describe Sisley as "a painter of the sky" (quoted in 'Alfred Sisley' in Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, 13-14, Paris, 1923).

Sisley was born in Paris in 1839 to expatriate British parents. When he was 18, they sent him to London to study commerce, his father hoping that Alfred would follow in his own footsteps as a businessperson. The young man skipped most of his classes, however, preferring to spend his time in the National Gallery. In 1862, after returning to Paris, he enrolled in the atelier of Charles Gleyre, where he became close friends with a number of painters his own age, including Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the years ahead, this trio would travel through rural and suburban France together executing landscapes en plein air – and in the process, forge a new approach to painting. This approach came to be known as Impressionism.

Sisley and Monet would remain friends for the better part of four decades – until the former's untimely death in 1899, at the age of 59. After visiting Sisley in his final days, Monet wrote a letter to Geffroy, in which he claimed: "He is a truly great artist, and I believe he is as great a master as any who has ever lived" (quoted in M.A. Stevens (ed.), Alfred Sisley, London, 1992, p. 280).

La Seine à Suresnes bears a distinguished provenance, its first known owner being businessman and art collector Wilhelm Hansen, the founder of two major Danish insurance companies (Dansk Folkeforsikringsanstalt and Mundus) and the managing director of another (Hafnia). He began his collection with works from Denmark, but from 1916 onwards, under the guidance of the French journalist and art connoisseur, Théodore Duret, assembled with his wife Henni one of the finest collections of Impressionist pictures in northern Europe. The Hansens would construct a purpose-built gallery, called Ordrupgaard, to display their art collection to the public. This was ultimately bequeathed to the Danish state and became a national museum in 1953.

The next owner of La Seine à Suresnes was the Japanese businessman, Kōjirō Matsukata, who – in parallel to his professional activities, as presidents of firms such as the Kawasaki Shipbuilding Company – devoted his life to collecting art. The non-Japanese works in his collection laid the foundation for the National Museum of Western Art, in Tokyo. After Matsukata's death, the painting went on deposit with the Bridgestone Museum of Art in the same city. It was acquired by the present owners at auction in 1984 and comes to the market for the first time in almost 40 years.