Overview
Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, perhaps the most successful French painter during the last quarter of the 19th century, was admired by both conservative and liberal critics alike. He exhibited throughout his lifetime at the Salons of Paris and remains well represented in museum and private collections throughout Europe and America. Guillemet maintained close friendships with Renoir, Monet, Berthe, Morisot, Jean-Baptiste, and Emile Corot, whom he called “Papa”, the leading painter of the Barbizon School of landscape painting. Guillaumin also established a close relationship with Van Gogh who admired his elder and perhaps most identified through his own style and palette. Of the first-generation Impressionists, Guillaumin was the most adventurous and the boldest with his color palette which bordered on Expressionist or Fauvist in intensity. Guillemet’s innovative use of brighter colors, his individualistic handling of paint, and his more experimental approach to landscape painting places him as one of the leading painters of his time.