阿爾弗雷德．西斯利 (1839-1899)

This winter scene was painted at Louveciennes, a picturesque suburban enclave about twenty kilometers west of Paris where Sisley lived from 1871 until 1875. With its willow-lined river banks and gently rolling hills, Louveciennes (along with the neighbouring towns of Bougival and Marly-le-Roi) had long attracted a sizable colony of writers and painters. In the 1830s, the painter Madame Vigée-Lebrun described being seduced 'by this spacious view that unfolds, as the eye follows the long course of the Seine, by the splendid woods at Marly and the delightful orchards, so well-tended you could believe yourself in the Promised Land; in short, by everything about Louveciennes, one of the most charming places on the outskirts of Paris' (quoted in R. Shone, Sisley, New York, 1992, p. 54). Yet it was the Impressionist painters above all who embraced the area around Louveciennes. By the time that Sisley moved there in 1871, Pissarro and Renoir were already settled in the vicinity, and Monet was staying nearby at Argenteuil. The landscapes that the four artists painted there from 1869 onward are often considered the first Impressionist pictures, and the region has been justly nicknamed the 'cradle of Impressionism' (R. Brettell, A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984, p. 79).

In the present painting, Sisley depicts a road at Louveciennes at dawn. The ground is snow-covered, the sky is a pale, silvery blue, the fields are rendered in subtly gradated tones of beige, blue and green, applied with a soft, square brush, and the composition is organized with rigorous precision. Describing Sisley's work from this period, Christopher Lloyd has written: 'The group of paintings by Sisley dating from the 1870s are subject to the strictest pictorial organization. It is this compositional aspect, in addition to their facture, that makes these pictures, in comparison with landscapes by artists of the Barbizon school, specifically modern. Sisley incorporates an almost relentless array of horizontals, verticals, and diagonals deployed as plunging perspectives and flat bands of planar divisions. The origins of such a style can be found in seventeenth-century French painting carried forward through Henri-Pierre Valenciennes to neo-classical landscape painting culminating in the Italian landscapes of Corot dating from the 1820s. Yet Sisley, moreso in many cases even than Pissarro and Monet, was more radical than any of his sources, since he seeks to bring order to a world in an ever increasing state of flux. The depiction of modernity was best served by a resolute style derived from astute visual analysis and confident technique' (Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, pp. 14-16).