Master Art

Having  returned from London in 1859, Sisley entered Charles Gleyre's atelier in Paris. Four years later, he had two works accepted for the first time at the official Salon. These were not history paintings but landscapes
of the village of Marlotte, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau.

As such they declared the artist's commitment to landscape painting as it  had been defined from the 1830s by Corot and members of the School of  Barbizon.

Furthermore, although it would appear that he adhered
to their principle of making sketches outdoors, the scale, the careful  balanced composition and studied technique of our work indicate that he followed the normal practice of landscape artists at the time of working up plein-air studies back in the studio to create finished exhibition pictures.

By the mid-1860s, Sisley was applying his paint in
broad, quite heavily-loaded brushwork which firmly defined the objects portrayed, be the trees in blossom or the careful recorded wooden table and benches.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, marked an important
break within the artist's career whom atelier was destroyed through bombings.

The painter lost everything he owned, which explains
the small number of surviving works of this time, and of which our work is part.