Alfred Sisley

In 1898, a year before he died, Alfred Sisley applied for French citizenship. He had lived in France since he was a teenager, painted its rivers and villages for four decades, and shown alongside Monet and Renoir at the early Impressionist exhibitions. The application was refused. He tried a second time, backed by a police report vouching for his character, but illness overtook him first, and he died in January 1899 still holding a British passport, the nationality of his parents, who had run an import business in Paris.

That mismatch runs through his whole career. Sisley trained in the Paris studio of the Swiss teacher Charles Gleyre, where he met Renoir, Monet and the painter Frédéric Bazille, and by the early 1870s he had settled into painting almost nothing but landscape, worked outdoors, directly from the motif, more steadily than any of that group. When his father's import business collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, painting stopped being a private pursuit and became his only income, and it stayed thin for the rest of his life. His views of the Seine at Argenteuil and the bridges around Moret-sur-Loing, in pale greens and dusty pinks, went largely unsold while he lived.

Sisley died of throat cancer a few months after his wife Eugénie, having asked his old friend Monet to look after their two children. Monet in turn persuaded the dealer Georges Petit to auction Sisley's paintings for the children's support, and within a year one of them, a flood scene at Port-Marly, sold for 43,000 francs, more than the artist had earned from a single work in his lifetime.