It is not a joke to describe Alfred Sisley as the English Impressionist, for Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Cézanne were his friends and his paintings were included in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, the second and third of 1876 and 1877, and he dominated the seventh in 1882 with 27 paintings — yet he died an Englishman. He was, however, more French than English, in spite of English parentage. Born in Paris in 1839 (the same year as Cézanne), educated there until 1857 (then three years in London) and returning there in 1860 to train as a painter, setting up home and family with a florist girl whom he, a bohemian with beard and beret, was not to marry until the year of her death; within a few months he himself was dead, the paintings in his studio dispersed.

As a painter he had few contacts with Britain — three months of summer into winter in London in 1874, and the same season, slightly longer, in Wales in 1897 — but it is with the work of these brief periods that the National Gallery demonstrates in a current exhibition the developing daring of his hand and eye. The immediate impression — caused entirely by the revision of the Sunley Room and the paintings that, in chronological reverse, come into view first — is of Monet influenced by Maggi Hambling, of seascapes in series unutterably dull in composition, of an isolated rock in imitation of a Monet Grain Stack on the beach that, in the last of the sequence, is mercifully awash with Maggi’s lively loaded brushstrokes.

I have never understood the regard in which Sisley is and has been held by art historians and critics — even those whom I respect. In my last year as a student, Anita Brookner opined that he was “the greatest painter of suburbs since suburbs evolved”, and I have never since heard a contrary view. My own view is that he had a bad eye for a poor subject. The English paintings of 1874, largely of Molesey and Hampton Court, are things of amateurishly wayward construction and perspective and perfectly illustrate my contention that, had he walked a little further or looked back over his shoulder, he would almost certainly have found a more coherent view of a more interesting subject. A critic in Le Figaro once commented that “tiredness, weariness has set in, his brush has lost its precision, his drawing has become careless” — he was, of course, writing of Sisley’s facture, but the subject could well have been Sisley’s feet.

Looking at the exhibition chronologically, the Welsh rock pictures begin to seem an interesting, even a worthwhile development but the awkward perspective with which Sisley bravely wrestled in the cliff-top pictures of the period, more often than not results in calamitous defeat that only amateur art historians should find estimable. The curators nevertheless aver that wretched Sisley was one of Impressionism’s “greatest landscape painters”.

Sisley in England and Wales is at the National Gallery (020 7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk)
until 15 February 2009. Daily 10am-6pm, Wednesdays 10am-9pm.Admission free.