La maison abandonnée by Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley 1839-1899 | British La maison abandonnée Signed and dated ‘Sisley 87’ (lower right) Oil on canvas Alfred Sisley’s La maison abandonnée captures the quiet poetry of the French countryside through the eyes of one of Impressionism’s great landscape painters. At the height of his mature style, Sisley turned to rural houses, open skies and shifting natural light to create some of his most evocative landscapes. In this exquisite 1887 composition, an old stone house sits tucked into the landscape, its weathered walls and terracotta roof partly hidden by dense green vines and overgrown brush. Wildflowers, shrubs and untamed vegetation fill the foreground, while the right side of the composition opens toward a distant river valley. Above, a broad luminous sky dominates the scene, animated by delicate pink clouds that heighten the work’s sense of atmosphere and quiet isolation. In the 1880s, while living in Veneux-les-Sablons near the forest of Fontainebleau and the Loing River, Sisley often found his subjects along the rural paths of the village outskirts. The abandoned house offered him a poignant image of time’s passage, its weathered architecture gradually giving way to the surrounding vegetation. Here, the structure becomes both a compositional anchor and a meditation on nature’s quiet reclamation of human spaces. Born in Paris to British parents, Sisley studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris within the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he formed close friendships with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille. Despite financial hardship and his repeated attempts to obtain French citizenship, Sisley devoted himself almost entirely to landscape, painting en plein air and seeking to capture the ephemeral nature of light and air. La maison abandonnée reveals the depth of Sisley’s artistic vision, transforming a humble rural subject into a deeply atmospheric Impressionist landscape. Comparable works by Sisley are held in major museum collections including the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay. Painted 1887 Canvas: 20 1/2" high x 28" wide (52.07 x 71.12 cm) Framed: 30 1/2" high x 38" wide x 3" deep (77.47 x 96.52 x 7.62 cm) Literature: R. H. Hubbard, European Paintings in Canadian Collections, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 158. LeMoine FitzGerald, Lionel. Development of an Artist, 1978. pg. 78 Brame, Sylvie, and François Lorenceau. Alfred Sisley: Catalogue critique des peintures et des pastels. Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts; Paris: Galerie Brame & Lorenceau, 2021. Provenance: A & R Ball, New York R.A. Purves, Winnipeg Loch Mayberry Gallery, Winnipeg Graeme Sifton, Winnipeg Loch Mayberry Gallery, Winnipeg Harry Brotchie, Winnipeg Private collection, Toronto M.S. Rau, New Orleans