Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin

Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927) was one of the founding figures of French Impressionism and among the longest-lived of the original members of the group. Born in Paris in 1841, he pursued his artistic training at the Académie Suisse, where he formed close friendships with Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro that would last for the rest of his life. These early connections placed him at the very center of the emerging Impressionist community, and he participated in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, taking part in six of the eight official Impressionist exhibitions that followed.

For much of his early career, Guillaumin was forced to support himself through employment with the Paris municipal government, painting only in his limited free time. His fortunes changed dramatically in 1891 when he won one hundred thousand francs in the lottery, a windfall that allowed him to devote himself entirely to painting for the rest of his life. Freed from financial constraint, he entered his most productive and confidently colored period, traveling widely through France and producing an extended body of landscapes marked by their bold, saturated palette and confident touch.

Guillaumin is particularly celebrated for his depictions of the Creuse Valley in central France, where he was one of the leading painters of the École de Crozant, and for his brilliantly colored views of the Mediterranean coast at Agay. His use of intense, unblended color anticipated aspects of Fauvism, and his engagement with color at its most vivid impressed the younger Vincent van Gogh during the latter's Paris years. Guillaumin also produced accomplished etchings. He died in 1927 at the age of eighty-six. His paintings are held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée d'Art Moderne, and other major international collections.