Alfred Sisley was a French-born British painter and founding member of Impressionism. Sisley's Snow at Louveciennes (1878), is emblematic of the movement’s attempt to register fleeting effects of weather and light. “The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder,” he once remarked. “By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.” Born on October 30, 1839 in Paris, France to British parents, he retained his parents’ nationality even as he lived the majority of his life in France. Sent to London by his father in 1857 to study commerce, Sisley neglected his work and often visited the city’s museums, where he saw the works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Returning to Paris in 1860, he studied under the painter Charles Gleyre alongside Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together the young painters traveled to forests outside of Paris and began producing paintings en plein air (in open air). Despite his commitment to the Impressionist style, Sisley’s works never gained the same recognition as his colleagues Monet and Renoir. He died in Moret-sur-Loing, France on January 29, 1899 at the age of 59. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and Neue Pinakothek in Munich, among others.