Page 116 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Alfred Sisley: Regatta at Molesey 1874
Sisley - an Anglo-French painter, became one of the great popularisers of Impressionism in the UK - appealing with his paintings at Molesey - and at Cowes - of the great rowing and yachting regattas that colourfully characterised a rapidly expanding maritime empire at this time. Of course the painterly treatment of water surfaces and evanescent sky-scapes was an important factor in en plein-aire painting, and encouraged the adoption of flecks, dabs and small painterly flourishes in rendering the changing light effects of reflections from water.
Here on the Thames at Molesey, during a visit just after the first Impressionist exhibition, Sisley completes a series of ‘definitive’ impressionist paintings (Kenneth Clark describes this period as "a perfect moment of Impressionism.”. I find this painting totally expressive of the feeling of a boating regatta. I used to sail X-One designs (XODs) at Cowes Week in a fleet of sometimes over eighty boats, with many yachts of different classes manouvering for their start-line and start-time - very exciting - a whirl of rapid tacking, hairy near misses, sail changes, tactical positioning to be to windward at the start-line, all the intense moments tracked in time to be just one the line at the gun. Sisley captures some of this visual and visceral excitement.
Impressionism marks the beginning of the phase-shift from traditional art appreciation into a much broader and more open appreciation of the process of ‘abstraction from nature’ that marked the modernist approach - with the post-impressionist work of Van Gogh, Mondrian, Cezanne, Gauguin and Matisse indicating the important directions to come (Cubism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Abstraction etc).