Alfred Sisley
1839 - 1899
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. After the independent exhibition of Impressionist paintings in 1874, Impressionism attracted great interest, though unlike Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet, Sisley did not benefit from its popularity during his lifetime.
Text © Muskegon Museum of Art, 2017
