Sisley, Alfred (1839-1899)
Bords de rivière, la Tamise à Hampton Court, premiers jours d’octobre (River banks, the Thames at Hampton Court, early October)
s.d.
Oil on canvas, 66.4 x 91.8 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Alfred Sisley‘s second trip to England, after his attempt at a commercial career between 1857 and 1859, dates back to 1874. At the beginning of that year, the painter accepted an offer to accompany the famous baritone of the Opéra Comique, Jean-Baptiste Faure, to England in exchange for six paintings. Sisley thus had the opportunity to consolidate a relationship that was already well underway, because Faure was one of the collectors who most admired and bought his paintings, so much so that he came to own no less than sixty of them.
Bords de rivière ou La Tamise à Hampton Court is part of a fairly large group of works – sixteen – that the artist produced between June and early October. Unlike other Impressionist painters, such as Monet and Pissarro, who had taken refuge in London during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871 and who had painted numerous views of the city, Sisley stayed only a short time in Brompton Crescent, in the South Kensington district. He preferred to move to Hampton Court, a fashionable place at that time, perhaps because the park of the royal castle there had been opened to the public only a short time before, or because the town was well connected to the capital by a railway line. According to Nicholas Reed, Sisley stayed at the Castle Inn, from whose terrace he also painted two pictures, but the majority of his production mainly testifies to his interest in the areas surrounding the city centre. The Thames is a constant presence in his paintings from this period and, as Richard Shone points out, Sisley was able to fully capture the festive atmosphere that animated those days. Unlike his French production, which focused solely on the study of landscapes, in these works the painter integrated the human presence more continuously, to the point of dedicating two paintings to extremely multitudinous and lively events such as the Molesey Regatta, near Hampton Court (Les régates à Molesey, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and the Hampton Court Regatta. These last paintings particularly show the intensity of the experimental phase that Sisley went through at the beginning of the seventies and constitute a clear example of how he renewed his own style, freeing up his brushstrokes and choosing more lively colours for his canvases.
Perhaps to satisfy the demands of the collector who had offered him this trip, he accompanied these more experimental works with a production more in line with his Parisian works, such as Bords de rivière or the other three versions of The Thames at Hampton Court (Earl of Jersey collection; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). In the painting in question, Sisley returned to a more homogeneous arrangement of the figures along the path that runs along the river and refused to concentrate them in the background of the scene, as he had done for example in The Bridge of Hampton Court: the Castle Inn (private collection). Furthermore, like Monet in some of his works, Sisley used the dense pattern of the trees in the background of the composition to encourage the viewer’s eye to move from one part of the canvas to another and pick out all the details scattered there. The work thus allows us not only to understand the dense dialogue that took place between various representatives of the impressionist circle in those years, but also to see how a style more in line with his previous production was still extremely important to him in these circumstances. (Christian Omodeo | MNBA)