Alfred Sisley, Nets drying, 1872 by Atelier Liesjes

Sisley, whose parents were British, grew up in Paris and met Renoir and Monet at art school in 1862. Very few works by Sisley from the 1860s are known today, as the artist lost almost everything during the invasion of France by Prussian troops in 1870. Nets is one of the earliest Impressionist paintings. It belongs to a small group of landscapes executed in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a village on the Seine, just north of Paris, in early 1872. Around that time, Sisley was staying at the house of Monet, who settled in the river village of Argenteuil after the war. Monet introduced Sisley to influential art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought fifty-nine paintings from him between 1872 and 1873, almost his entire output, including Drying Nets. Drying Nets portrays a bridge across the Seine to the island of Saint-Denis, but in the spirit of the Barbizon landscape tradition, the weather and daily activities of ordinary people are of greater importance in the painting than the specific location. In terms of subject and composition, river scenes by Charles-François Daubigny, for example, served as models for Sisley, Monet and their colleagues's during the 1960s and 1970s. But there is nothing traditional about Sisley's style in Drying Nets. His brushwork is entirely stenographic, with short jerky brushstrokes to depict the grassy bank, and more uniform dashed brushstrokes for the textures of water and the changing atmosphere. The winding narrow path along which Sisley set up his portable easel suggests that he accidentally stumbled onto the scene while walking along the river.

Alfred Sisley (Paris, 30 October 1839 - Moret-sur-Loing, 29 January 1899) was a British Impressionist painter, who lived and worked largely in France.