Alfred Sisley

In 1864 none of these young men had a name yet for what they were doing. Two years earlier Renoir had walked into the Paris studio of the Swiss teacher Charles Gleyre and fallen in with Monet, Bazille, and the sitter here, the British-born painter Alfred Sisley. Of that circle Sisley was the well-off one, son of a prosperous merchant, and it was he who commissioned this portrait from his friend. Renoir shows him relaxed and finely dressed, a young man who could still afford to be. The word Impressionism lay more than a decade ahead. So did the turn that gives the picture its edge: Sisley's father was ruined around the war of 1870, and the man who looks so untroubled here spent his last years poor, dying in 1899 before his landscapes found buyers.