Alfred Sisley

Jean-Baptiste Faure, Paris
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on 1st March 1900)
Private Collection, Paris
Wildenstein & Co., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, A. Sisley, 1887 or 1897, no. 8
London, Grafton Gallery, Pictures by Boudin, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, 1905, no. 297
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Tableaux de Sisley, 1930, no. 46
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Sisley, 1937, no. 32
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Sisley, 1957, no. 47
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Alfred Sisley, 1971, no. 40, illustrated in the catalogue

Charles-Louis Borgmeyer, The Master Impressionists, Chicago, 1913, illustrated p. 263
Georges Wildenstein, 'Un carnet de dessins de Sisley au Musée du Louvre', in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 53, January 1959, mentioned p. 60
François Daulte, Alfred Sisley. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Lausanne, 1959, no. 512, illustrated

The canvas is lined. Apart from some minor areas of retouching along all four framing edges, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the blues are deeper in the original.
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Les Coteaux de la Celle-sous-Moret depicts the landscape around Saint-Mammès, a small village situated at the confluence of the rivers Seine and Loing, just north of Moret-sur-Loing. Sisley first moved with his family to Veneux-Nadon near Moret-sur-Loing in 1880, and continued to live in the area for the rest of his life, moving several times between the two villages. The local scenery offered a constant source of inspiration to the artist, who tried to capture the relationship between land, water and sky as well as the changing effects of light on his surroundings. Having painted numerous views of the bridge, river bank and quayside of Saint-Mammès in 1880-81, Sisley focused his attention on Le Loing and its canal, which joined the Seine at Saint-Mammès, and between 1882 and 1885 executed a series of works depicting this area.

Vivienne Couldrey has written on the significance of this area for the artist: 'It is difficult to over-emphasise the importance of Moret, for Sisley painted most of his life's work in the area [...]. It is an essentially Impressionist place with the gentle light of the Île-de-France, the soft colours and the constantly changing skies of northern France. There are green woods and pastures, curving tree-lined banks of rivers, canals and narrow streams, wide stretches of the river where the Loing joins the Seine at Saint-Mammès, old stone houses, churches and bridges' (V. Couldrey, Alfred Sisley, The English Impressionist, Exeter, 1992, p. 68).

In the present composition, Sisley depicts a resplendant light signifying a bright, sun-filled day. His series of Moret landscapes capture the essence of the Impressionist plein-air technique and the desire to paint variations across seasons and different degrees of light. As the critic Gustave Geffroy wrote in 1923, Sisley 'sought to express the harmonies that prevail, in all weathers and at every time of the day between foliage, water and sky, and he succeeded... He loved river banks; the fringes of woodland; towns and villages glimpsed through the trees; old buildings swamped in greenery; winter morning sunlight, summer afternoons' (G. Geffroy, 'Sisley', in Les Cahiers d'Aujourd'hui, Paris, 1923).