El matrimonio Sisley

A man bends tenderly toward a woman on his arm, life-size and close. Renoir painted his friend Alfred Sisley with Lise Trehot, Renoir's own lover, and made one of the first modern images of an engaged couple.

The story behind the painting

Renoir and Alfred Sisley both studied in the studio of Charles Gleyre in the early 1860s, and by 1865 they were good friends. Renoir painted Sisley several times, beginning with Mother Anthony's Tavern in 1866. This picture was made around 1868, during Renoir's early Salon period, when he focused on themes of couples; Wikidata dates it only to the 1860s. A letter Renoir wrote to Frederic Bazille in September 1869 names the woman at Sisley's side as his model Lise Trehot. In the same letter he wrote of his desperate need for money and said he had shown the pictures of Lise and Sisley at a dealer's, Carpentier.

What to look for

The picture is large, about 105 by 75 cm, and the figures are close to life size. Sisley leans toward Lise with a caressing gesture, and she answers with a grateful, intimate closeness. She wears a full crinoline dress. Look at the gestures more than the faces: the art historian Michael F. Zimmermann says the painter shows them from the viewpoint of a close friend, who knows these gestures are habitual and still finds them touching. The handling shows the influence of Realism and especially of Edouard Manet, though Renoir was already moving toward his own style.

Meaning and intent

The pairing is quietly surprising. Lise was Renoir's lover when he painted it, yet he had her pose with Sisley, who was himself involved with another woman, Eugenie Lescouezec. So this is not a wedding portrait of a real couple but a staged scene between friends. Zimmermann calls the result the modern image of an engaged couple, and also a genre portrait enlarged to life size. The warmth in it comes from a circle of young painters and models who knew each other well, and from Renoir's eye for small, everyday affection.

Legacy

The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne acquired the painting in 1912. In 2021 the museum X-rayed it and found an altogether different painting beneath the present one. Pablo Picasso admired Renoir, at one time owned seven of his paintings and defended him fiercely against his critics in the avant-garde. Inspired by this picture, Picasso made three pencil studies titled Le Menage Sisley. The work is known by several names, among them A Couple, The Engaged Couple and Alfred Sisley and his Wife.