Alfred Sisley

Jules Feder, Paris 
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on 25th June 1892)
Galerie Tanner, Zurich (acquired from the above on 4th June 1931)
Elbert Jan van Wisselingh & Co., Amsterdam
Knoedler and Co., New York
Harry Stevenson Southam, Ottawa (probably by 1934)
Mrs John Barry Ryan Collection, New York (by circa 1950)
Thence by descent to the present owners

Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada & travelling in Canada, Exhibition of French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, 1934, no. 114

François Daulte, Alfred Sisley, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Lausanne, 1959, no. 160, illustrated n.p.

The canvas is lined. There is a milky varnish preventing the UV light from fully penetrating, however UV examination does not reveal any evidence of retouching. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Depicting an idyllic rural scene of washerwomen on the banks of the Seine, Les Lavandières à Bougival, executed in 1875, dates from a period of Alfred Sisley’s career which saw him produce a series of Impressionistic masterpieces. Sisley here imbues the trees and water with an extraordinary sense of movement through rapidly applied brushstrokes, re-creating the impressions and atmospheric conditions of a windswept afternoon on the river banks to remarkable effect. After the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871, Sisley decided to move with his family to the village of Louveciennes, situated on the river Seine, about thirty kilometres west of the capital, and in the winter of 1874 they moved to the neighbouring Marly-le-Roi. This setting provided the artist with a new creative impetus and, once settled, he started working with fresh energy. He explored the beauty of the Seine valley, and took delight in painting this new environment, trying to capture the effects of season, weather and time of day on the countryside, whilst experimenting with the effects of light and colour.

The village of Bougival, where the present work was painted, served as a particular source of inspiration for the artist, and Mary-Anne Stevens has outlined the specific aspects of the place which might have attracted the artist: ‘Lying slightly further away from the centre of Paris and thus as yet untouched by the spreading suburban industrialisation and urban growth which had already hit towns closer in… Bougival’s riverbanks retained traditional small-scale industries such as saw mills and sand extraction… Bougival and its buildings were picturesquely clustered along the river bank’ (quoted in Alfred Sisley (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London (and travelling), 1992, p. 116).

Les Lavandières à Bougival features an intriguing provenance. The first owner was Jules Feder, celebrated as one of the earliest supporters of Durand-Ruel and the Impressionist painters. As the director of a bank, Union Générale, Feder helped Durand-Ruel to make significant purchases of Impressionist works, including around twenty paintings by Sisley. Continuing the legacy of prestigious ownership, the work was also in the collection of Mrs John Barry Ryan (the present owner’s mother). Daughter of the legendary early twentieth century financier Otto Kahn, Mrs Ryan, known as Nin, became a celebrated collector of Impressionist paintings as well as an important patron of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1951 her family sold a Rembrandt masterpiece, Portrait of a Young Student, for the sum of $90,000 (the equivalent of around $845,000 today), the proceeds of which went towards funding several major new opera productions at the Metropolitan. Mrs Ryan was also the proud owner of Manet’s The Bench until its sale five years before her death. Taking its place in the collection amongst these other great master works, Les Lavandières à Bougival can be seen as being a highly significant work from this period of Sisley’s career.