Impressionist Armand Guillaumin

The Impressionist Armand Guillaumin was born February 16th, 1841 and died in June 26th, 1927. He was a French painter and lithographer. Born in Paris, France, he worked at his uncle's lingerie shop while attending evening drawing lessons. He also worked for a French government railway before studying at the Académie Suisse in 1861. There, he met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro with whom maintained lifelong friendships. While he never achieved the stature of these two, his influence on their work was significant. Cézanne attempted his first etching based on Guillaumin paintings of barges on the River Seine.
Guillaumin exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 and later became a friend of Vincent van Gogh whose brother, Theo sold some of his works. Noted for his intense colors, major museums around the world display Guillaumin's art. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the Creuse département, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l'Estérel near the Mediterraneran coast in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France. Armand Guillaumin died in 1927 in Orly, Val-de-Marne just south of Paris.

(See above) Guillaumin was well known for his loose brush strokes which denote a feeling of energy and urgency in his work. Almost creating a mosaic like effect where the single brush stroke becomes an intergal part of the whole. His work in general seems to be breaking down the barrier between abstraction and impressionism. Instead of having a passion for the application of light through paint Guillaumin seems to focus on creating the wholeness of the scene where composition takes more of a priority.

Sunset At Ivry
He created contrasts, whether he was aware of it is a mystery. In the Sunset at Ivry nature is striving for prominece against industry. The artist Pissarro would likely have tried to to harmonize the two. From Guillaumin's point of view this communicates to me that in many ways Industry is not quite as beautiful as an unspoilt landscape however Pissarro seems to see the beauty in both with his rendering of the paint.

Guillaumin depicts one of natures most beautiful symbols, the sunset. However obscuring this are the black clouds of smoke being emitted by the stacks of the factory. While perhaps he does acknowledge the beauty of this factory's silhouette, and the effect of the heavyness of the smoke from a compositional point of view like the encroaching darkness he certainly puts the factory into battle with its surroundings, as opposed to a calm balance created by impressionists generally. What is strikingly noticable is that the river mirrors the smoke. Almost as if the smoke is the same in the sky as the river is on the land. So I can say that from my own point of view there is an interesting contradiction.


Manet
Camille Pissarro
The Impressionist Movement
American Impressionists
Modern Artists List.

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