Alfred Sisley was born in Paris to British parents and spent most of his life in France. He briefly studied business in London but returned to Paris and enrolled in the École bes Beaux-Arts in 1862. There, he associated with like-minded artists Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with whom he often painted outdoors. As with many early Impressionists, Sisley found his work routinely rejected from the Paris Salon and, with the loss of his father’s business in 1870, spent the rest of his life in poverty. The independent exhibition of Impressionist paintings in 1874 attracted great interest in the movement but, unlike Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet, Sisley did not benefit from its popularity during his lifetime.
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Alfred Sisley’s La Seine à St. Mammès was a gift of Chicago civic leader, arts patron, and connoisseur Martin Ryerson, Jr.. Ryerson was an honorary trustee of the Hackley Art Gallery board and son of Martin Ryerson, Sr., one of Muskegon’s early lumber barons. While Ryerson, Jr. did not choose to give the Gallery one of his Monets, the Sisley represents Monet’s abiding influence. The Seine was a favorite subject for artists, exemplified in Sisley’s view of the river’s sparkling waters framed by a grand, vigorously brushed tree and the shadows cast from its overarching branches.
This subject was an unusual one for Sisley. His colleague Monet painted a series of similar works devoted to tree-lined riverbanks in 1880 and again in 1896 and 1897. As the MMA’s Sisley predates these paintings, perhaps La Seine à St. Mammès was a direct influence upon Monet’s river scenes.