The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro
Alfred Sisley settled in Louveciennes, a village on the river Seine to the west of Paris, in 1871, and he painted here and in the neighbouring district of Marly-le-Roi for close to a decade, before moving to the south-east of Paris in the 1880s, dividing his time between a number of villages dotted along the Loing and the Seine rivers. In both rural areas, Sisley limited himself to a small number of motifs, which he studied with a focus and acuity of vision that became hallmarks of early Impressionism. Sisley exhibited seven paintings, the majority of which depicted the Louveciennes - Port-Marly region, in the very first Impressionist exhibition, held in 1874 at the photographer Félix Nadar's premises on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The notoriously anti-Impressionist critic Albert Wolff wrote, of Sisley's contributions to the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882, that his canvases seemed to show 'painting with a gun, for they say that he stuffs tubes of paint down the barrel of a rifle and shoots them at the canvas. He then signs the work!'
Camille Pissarro moved to Pontoise, to the north-west of Paris, in 1872; and then to the nearby villages of Osny and Eragny, where he extended his repertoire beyond the capturing of landscape vistas, to record the daily life and work of the rural inhabitants of these regions. By 1886, however, Pissarro had increasingly abandoned painting principally before nature, in favour of manipulating colour and light in his studio, in emulation of Georges Seurat's new chromo-luminarist theories. Seurat's scientific theories of colour division abandoned the harmonious blending of tones favoured by Impressionism, in favour of placing strong, opposing blocks of colour side by side. These would blend optically and create light, it was argued, when the viewer stood at a certain distance from a painting.
