We're used to the serious, romantic visions of Britain painted by Constable and Turner, watercoloured by Ruskin. Seeing how a French artist portrayed the British landscape is liberating. It takes a style we think we know - impressionism - and changes its language. This, in the end, is the charm of the National Gallery exhibition. Even the colour of the sea seems brighter than you'd ever catch it in reality in these parts: it looks Mediterranean, like Monet's views of the Côte d'Azur.ĭo these adjustments make his views of Wales inaccurate fantasies? Not at all. Looking closely, you see how he has made two islands look like one - perhaps they do, on a hazy summer evening. Yet there are little unresolvable differences. His painting The Cliff at Penarth, Evening, Low Tide (1897) is - like all his views of this part of south Wales - essentially accurate, its topography easily found. Yet there is no art that more gladly accepts the modern world where, as their contemporary Karl Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air".ĭown on the beach, it becomes even clearer how Sisley brought his own vision with him to Wales. Many people today think of impressionism as a soft, safe art - as respectable as the Old Masters, even more accessible. It is also what makes his painting, like that of all the impressionists, so radical. This sense of the immediate is what gives Sisley's views of the Welsh shore such easy joy. The impressionists painted fast, or wanted it to look like they did, trying to capture the fleeting, transitory effects of sunlight, the random patterns and colours that passing clouds throw across a scene. His views have a generous, open, misty warm light I suspect you'd need to be very lucky, even in summer, to see what he saw here. Sisley painted Wales as if it were the south of France. But where exactly did he stand? By this tree stump or that? The place the artist set down his easel is now a public footpath, there are new houses behind it - yet the view of the pier and beach is identical. Luckily for us, though, a warship is entering Cardiff bay and the tugs swarming around it briefly create the illusion of the busy sea Sisley painted. Yes, the smoky cargo ships he observed in his drawing Cardiff Roads (1897) have long gone Cardiff is no longer the coal capital of the world, Penarth is no longer the haunt of the industrial barons who built its fine houses. The pier appears just as it does in his paintings, the cliffs over the beach are just as wild. At Penarth, myself and Gareth (who lives in the area and knows where to look) are trying to match paintings in the exhibition catalogue with the seascape as it looks now. It is always fun to try and compare a landscape painting with the place it depicts. To look at these paintings is to encounter a Victorian Britain it feels like we never knew - a Britain of suburban idylls, modern moments, sensual impressions. The paintings he did here, including several views at Penarth, are brought together in the National Gallery's new exhibition Sisley in England and Wales. One of the founding members of the Société Anonyme - better known as the impressionist movement, a label bestowed on the group by a hostile critic - Sisley had British parents and made a series of trips to Britain. Photographer Gareth Phillips and I are walking on a hilltop path above Penarth beach looking for a view painted in 1897 by French artist Alfred Sisley on his last trip to Britain. And yet it reminds me of something else: the rocky shores of Brittany, or the beach at Deauville. This is Penarth in south Wales, just around a headland from Cardiff bay, and I am looking across at the hills of Devon, at Weston and Ilfracombe. He was able to record diverse light effects by painting in the open-air at different times of the day.Īlthough Sisley contributed to many of the Impressionistic exhibitions, he never received the recognition of his peers while he was alive.T he sea is calm and graceful, the 19th-century pier below us juts out from the beach, and on the shore I can make out tiny figures enjoying the November breeze between a break in the rains. His most significant series of landscapes depict the flood of 1876 at Port-Marley. Most of his paintings, however, are of scenes in and around Paris. Sisley's style differed somewhat from that of the Impressionist school his brushstroke was firm and created a higher definition of form, a technique reminiscent of English landscape painters. Like Monet, Sisley devoted most of his career to painting Impressionistic landscapes. Sisley has been compared to his longtime friend and colleague, Claude Monet, whom he met while studying at the Gleyre studio in Paris in the early 1860s. His English parents intended for him to go into the financial industry, but Sisley chose instead to dedicate himself to painting. Alfred Sisley, a French Impressionist painter, was born in Paris in 1839.
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