ARMAND GUILLAUMIN (FRENCH 1841-1927) “PAYSAGE"

Provenance: Acquavella Galleries, New York, New York.

Acquired directly from the above in 1964.

Collection of Jack Dorrance and Charlotte Wright.

By descent in the family.

Collection of Dorrance H. Hamilton.

NOTE:

French Impressionist Armand Guillaumin was born in Paris in 1841, and spent much of his childhood in Moulins, a commune along the Allier River. At age fifteen, he began his artistic career taking drawing lessons in the evenings before enrolling at the Académie Suisse at age twenty. It was there that Guillaumin met Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), with whom he would maintain both a lifelong friendship and artistic relationship. In the early 1870s, Guillaumin traveled with Pissarro to Pontoise, a village in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. The two men worked en plein air, capturing the ever-changing beauty of the landscape. Guillaumin paid close attention to Pissarro's style and technique, and it was during this time that his own style of landscape painting took shape.

"Paysage" is a classic representation of Guillaumin's body of landscape paintings. The scene depicts a verdant creek bank, the sky beyond obscured by the wide spread of branches from the trees that dominate the foreground. The shaded rural landscape employs lush greens throughout - from the dark, leafy overgrowth of the trees to the pale, almost yellow grass along the subtle rise and fall of the forest floor - sliced through with Guillaumin's signature winding pathway. Guillaumin's deep appreciation for the natural world shines through in the present piece, despite the absence of any wide expanse of sky or direct source of sunlight.