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LE

 

CLAIRE

 

                                                SEIT 1982 

KUNST 

ELBCHAUSSEE 386 ∙ 22609 HAMBURG ∙ TELEFON: [phone] ∙ FAX: [phone] 

[e-mail] ∙ WWW.LECLAIRE-KUNST.DE 

HYPOVEREINSBANK HAMBURG ∙ BLZ: 200 300 00 ∙ KTO: 222 5464 

SWIFT (BIC): HYVEDEMM300 ∙ IBAN: DE88 200 3000 0000 222 5464 

STEUERNUMMER 42/040/02717 ∙ UST.-ID.-NR.: DE 118 141 308 

ARMAND GUILLAUMIN 

1841 - Paris - 1927 

 

La Roche de l’Echo à Crozant, Creuse 

 

Pastel on laid paper; c.1919. 

Signed in the lower right: Guillaumin, and inscribed: Crozant. 

On the back of the cardboard with the fragment of an inscription by his son André Guillaumin. 

480 x 620 mm 

 

P

ROVENANCE

: Private collection, Sweden 

 

 

Armand Guillaumin was closely associated with the emergence of French Impressionism from the 

very outset. He studied at the Académie Charles Suisse where he met Cézanne and Pissarro. Both 

were to become his lifelong friends. He exhibited at the 1863 Salon des refusés and was in close contact 

with the circle of artists who frequented the Café Guerbois, a centre of debate on the new Impressionist 

aesthetic. He showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in the studio of the photographer Nadar in 

1874 and went on to exhibit regularly with the Impressionists in the years up to 1886. 

 

Guillaumin’s landscapes were painted almost without exception directly from nature. As he himself 

said, unless I am face-to-face with nature I am incapable of a single brushstroke.

1

 Pastels played a key role in his work 

from the beginning. It was in this medium that he developed the spontaneous brushwork found in 

his paintings, which creates form in capturing the effects of light. 

 

His earliest motifs were taken from the countryside around Paris. Later, in 1887, he discovered the 

tiny village of Crozant in the Creuse valley and the nearby landscapes on the western edge of the 

Massif Central. He was to return to the area regularly, moving to live there in 1907. Claude Monet, 

who was virtually the same age as Guillaumin, visited Fresselines, another village in the Creuse 

valley, in 1889. He too was fascinated by the rugged beauty of the valley, producing twenty-two 

paintings in the period between March and April of that year [compare fig. 1].

2

 The natural colours of 

the Crozant area, which is sheep-farming country, are remarkably striking all year round. The 

landscapes vary between gorges dense with age-old trees and pastureland alive with touches of yellow 

gorse, purple erica, red digitalis and the bright green of bracken.

3

 

 

The present pastel depicts the Creuse valley on a bright summer’s day. The splendid colours of the 

slopes, trees and sky are even redoubled by their reflections in the calm waters of the river. As early as 

1881 Guillaumin was described by the writer and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans as a ferocious 

colourist.

4 

He used heightened effects of colour, composing harmonies from combinations of 

complementary colours: orange-red and blue-green, purple and green, or mauve and yellow. This 

expressive use of colour, with its vibrant harmonies, is characteristic of Guillaumin’s style from the 

1880s onwards. This clearly establishes him as a precursor of Fauvism. 

 

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LE

 

CLAIRE

 

                                                SEIT 1982 

KUNST 

ELBCHAUSSEE 386 ∙ 22609 HAMBURG ∙ TELEFON: [phone] ∙ FAX: [phone] 

[e-mail] ∙ WWW.LECLAIRE-KUNST.DE 

HYPOVEREINSBANK HAMBURG ∙ BLZ: 200 300 00 ∙ KTO: 222 5464 

SWIFT (BIC): HYVEDEMM300 ∙ IBAN: DE88 200 3000 0000 222 5464 

STEUERNUMMER 42/040/02717 ∙ UST.-ID.-NR.: DE 118 141 308 

His passionate response to nature impressed Vincent van Gogh, who was to befriend him in Paris in 

1886-7. Van Gogh’s brother Theo assisted Guillaumin in selling his work. Guillaumin continued to 

demonstrate increasing artistic powers and remarkable individuality, developing, in a modernist 

sense, the innovatory discoveries of Impressionism.

5

 

 

The work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by Dominique Fabiani, 

Stephanie Chardeau-Botteri, and Jacques de la Beraudière (dated 21 April 2013). It will be included in 

the second volume of the catalogue raisonné Armand Guillaumin, being prepared by the Comité 

Guillaumin. 

 

 

 

Fig. 1: Claude Monet, Valley of the Petite Creuse, 1889, oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.3 cm. 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA [inv. no. 23.541] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Je suis incapable de donner une touche ailleurs que sur nature. Cited after Lydia Harambourg, Armand Guillaumin peintre impressionniste, in 

La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot, no. 38, 3.11.2006, p. 207. 

2 Daniel Wildenstein, Monet. Catalogue raisonné (new edition), Taschen, Cologne 1996, III, nos. 1218-40. 

3 Rainer Budde and Barbara Schaefer (eds.), Miracle de la couleur, exhib. cat., Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Fondation 

Corboud, Cologne 2001, p. 150. 

4 Un coloriste féroce. Joris-Karl Huysmans, L’Art Moderne: L’Exposition des Indépendants, Paris 1902, p. 261. 

5 Taube G. Greenspan, in The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, London and New York 1996, XIII, p. 829.