Armand Guillaumin

Guillaumin’s best works date from the early, productive phase of his career. He went to Paris at the age of sixteen, first working in his uncle’s lingerie shop, then taking a job with the Orléans railway company (1863), and later with the bridges and roads department (1868). He took night shifts so that he could paint during the day. In the 1870s he often visited Pissarro (pictured) in Pontoise, and shared a studio in Paris with Cézanne, where Van Gogh visited them several times. (Guillaumin was not keen on his visits, finding the Dutch master’s views on art too forceful.) Guillaumin’s great good fortune — in 1891 he won the jackpot in the national lottery — was also his undoing, since from then on, assured of a permanent annual income of five thousand francs, he painted mostly for his own pleasure, with decidedly mixed results. In 1892 he rented a wooden house in the ancient village of Crozant on the river Creuse and became the leading figure of the so-called Crozant School. A bronze bust in the village preserves his memory.

From the page of Sunset at Ivry