13 Facts About Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.

Alfred Sisley's father, William Sisley, was in the silk business, and his mother, Felicia Sell, was a cultivated music connoisseur.

In 1857, at the age of 18, Alfred Sisley was sent to London to study for a career in business, but he abandoned it after four years and returned to Paris in 1861.

In 1866, Alfred Sisley began a relationship with Eugenie Lescouezec, a Breton living in Paris.

At the time, Alfred Sisley lived not far from Avenue de Clichy and the Cafe Guerbois, the gathering-place of many Parisian painters.

Occasionally Alfred Sisley would be backed by patrons, and this allowed him, among other things, to make a few brief trips to Britain.

Until 1880, Alfred Sisley lived and worked in the country west of Paris; then he and his family moved to a small village near Moret-sur-Loing, close to the forest of Fontainebleau, where the painters of the Barbizon school had worked earlier in the century.

In 1881, Alfred Sisley made a second brief voyage to Great Britain.

Alfred Sisley died on 29 January 1899 of throat cancer in Moret-sur-Loing at the age of 59, a few months after the death of his wife.

Alfred Sisley was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet.

Alfred Sisley concentrated on landscape more consistently than any other Impressionist painter.

Alfred Sisley produced some 900 oil paintings, some 100 pastels and many other drawings.

In 2008 a dispute erupted between Alain Dreyfus, an art dealer in Switzerland, and the auction house Christie's over a Alfred Sisley painting First Day of Spring in Moret, that was claimed by the Lindon family in court in Paris.