Art Appreciation: Alfred Sisley - "The Kitchen Garden"

Twice now I have attended the Farm To Table: Food and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibit at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and there is one painting that still has a hold over me since my first visit. The Kitchen Garden by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) was the painting I chose as my favorite out of the works I saw both those days. I can confidently say there were countless beautiful and touching works of art on display, and were each enjoyable or admirable in their own way for different reasons, one to the next. Where I might have been drawn to a different work if I was younger or were older, The Kitchen Garden stands out to me at this place in my life for my fascination with plein air paintings, my role as a painting student, and simply as a human being who with a love for these types of spaces.

Now, to talk about the piece itself.

https://kimbellart.org/collection/ag-201501

Every aspect of this painting feels lovingly attended to, which is to say, given the care that it asks of the artist for the intents and purposes of their painting. For instance, the buildings in the background on the horizon are at face value nothing more than small blocky strokes of white and brown, with small dabs of blue-grey for the implications of windows. "Implications" being key here, especially given that Sisley was an Impressionist painter. On the flip side, the greenery and the garden itself is given the same level as care, but begs for a different technique compared to the human architecture of the scene. The leaves of trees and petals of flowers are made of small, round dabs, and the stalks of vegetables and trunks of trees call for longer, vertical paint strokes.

Compositionally, I appreciate the break in the sky on the right half of the painting by the trees in the background. Though the horizon lies on the middle of the picture plane, the asymmetry of the top and bottom halves of the painting, and the movement created by the lit dirt path that snakes its way through the garden, create such a visual interest that nothing feels unnaturally balanced; quite the opposite. One little area of this piece that I treasure is the block of shadow cast by a building on the bottom left of the painting, acting like a cool area for one's eyes to rest on their journey through Sisley's The Kitchen Garden.

The inception for my love of oil painting began with a landscape painting class in my high school. Since then, the way I have observed the world around me has been, more often than not, through the lens of painting. Whatever Sisley was feeling at the time, he captured the sense of peace that comes with existing in this humble and beautiful space, and this is something I aspire to achieve with my own work. Whether he was conscious of trying to capture his particular time and place in the grander scheme of history, or simply desired to paint a slice of his life, I am grateful to have had a glimpse at the world through his eyes.

-Gigi M.

My lovely photo, can you tell I wanted to be a photo major?