Monday 29 August 2011

Flooding #1 - Sisley's Seine

The Banks of the Seine in Autumn flood by Sisley

I've been looking at the films of the horrendous flooding in Vermont - and was reminded of how often floods have been recorded in paint.

Now there's a lot of every eminent artists who live in Vermont and while I expect everybody's first thoughts are for their own safety and helping others right now, I hope we might see some paintings of the floods in due course.

This particular image is by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) who was
a French-born English Impressionist landscape painter who was born, and spent most of his life, in France. Sisley is generally recognized as the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (i.e., outdoors).
The Seine obviously flooded a lot in the nineteenth century as a number of the Impressionists recorded flooding.

Sisley in particular loved painting rivers and water - as can be seen from this website which holds a number of his works

UPDATE:  Charley Parker takes up the theme of Sisley painting floods - you can see more on his blog Lines and Colors - The Floods at Port Marly – Alfred Sisley

1 comment:

Mark Nesmith said...

I've always loved Sisley's works. I think he's often overlooked and underrated as a painter. He had such a subtle but intriguing sense of color. I hadn' realized how often floods have been portrayed in art. It seems like a very contemporary idea.

Mark Nesmith
http://paintdailytexas.blogspot.com