Interpretive Resource

In addition to his masterpiece The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, now in the Museé d’Orsay, Paris, Auguste Renoir sent six portraits to the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, including this Portrait of Alfred Sisley. Clearly, Renoir wanted to stake his claim as a modern portrait painter, since he showed more portraits than any other artist in the exhibition. The portrait of Sisley was the only portrait Renoir listed in the catalogue with a specific identification. The others all bore vaguely anonymous titles like Portrait of Madame G.C. or Portrait of Mademoiselle A.D. Although Sisley didn’t seem to mind the publicity, there is no evidence that the landscape painter ever owned the portrait. However, the two men had known each other well for more than a decade by 1875 and had already painted each other several times.

Renoir was a practiced portrait painter by the time he started this painting of Sisley. He had experimented with various compositional strategies, formats, and poses and had painted men, women, and children. His greatest achievement, the magisterial group portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was still to come. Yet, even in the modestly scaled portrait shown here, Renoir’s originality is evident. We see Sisley not as a painter, but as a young bourgeois, seated backwards on a fashionable bamboo chair, which supports his elbow. We have no clear sense of whether he is at home, in a studio, or even in a restaurant or cafe. Wherever he is, he is alone in his thoughts, and his pensive gesture and sidelong stare are clear indications that he is unaware of our presence and unconscious of being portrayed. He is less a model than an introspective young man; his pose appears natural and unaffected.

Renoir’s brush seems to dance over the surface of the young artist’s face and hands, refusing to settle on a contour. Hence, the figure, although anchored in his chair, seems to vibrate. It was precisely this quality of Renoir’s portraits that disturbed contemporary critics. One of them, Paul Sebillot, said that the portraits in the 1877 exhibition "look all right—at a distance—so that you do not notice too much his way of applying paintlike pastel hatchings and the peculiar scratches that make his style seem so painful." Others were bothered by Renoir’s persistent use of blue that, indeed, seems to suffuse this entire portrait. Renoir himself later repudiated his soft, Impressionist manner of paint handling, preferring, by the end of the 1870s, to give his figures firm contours and to define the volumes of their bodies clearly against the background. The Portrait of Alfred Sisley is among Renoir’s truly masterful Impressionist portraits; how appropriate that it represents a fellow Impressionist!