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As a Briton, Sisley didn’t fight, but we know he went to Paris, and he surely would have had contact with fellow artists, fighting for the doomed French Army. His house in the Paris suburbs was occupied by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War, and in a letter to a friend he said he lost everything he owned.

An undistinguished early genre picture, from 1865-66, sees Sisley follow Corot’s example in depicting flowering trees as a curtain of specked pigment. In his 20s he began painting landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau, where an earlier generation of French artists - Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, and the other members of the Barbizon school - began to imbue landscape painting with greater subjectivity. Sisley was born in Paris to expatriate British parents he lived in France almost his entire life. A retrospective at the Bruce Museum here, the first Sisley show in the United States in more than two decades, offers a chance to focus on an artist who may not be in the first rank of French artists but who deserves greater attention. But Sisley’s near-exclusive focus on landscape has meant that he now appears, fairly or unfairly, largely in the shadow of the big boys who called modern art into being in the mid-1860s. He was included in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 he showed with the leading Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and he maintained a close friendship with Monet even after leaving Paris for the suburbs.

It was a huge development in the history of art, but it had a side effect: Some significant painters, less socially engaged than Manet or Degas, ended up consigned to the B-team.Īlfred Sisley (1839-1899) is one of those painters. To truly see French painting of the late 19th century, historians averred, you had to understand their social history too - the urban reconstruction witnessed by the bourgeois Parisians in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte, or the health laws that regulated Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes, or the class divisions expressed by the clothes of Georges Seurat’s Sunday parkgoers. A reforming spirit swept through art history in the 1970s, when an academic discipline that once prized close looking above all else began to think about matters beyond form and symbolism.