Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin was born in Paris on February 16, 1841, in circumstances far more modest than those of many of his Impressionist peers. His family owned a small shop in the capital, and there was every expectation that their son would follow them in this practical trade. The need to support his family financially was a hallmark of his early year: at only fifteen he began work as a linen draper, and by his late teens he was in full time employment as a clerk for the Paris-Orléans railway. While Guillaumin had quietly nurtured a deep fascination with painting (he used almost every spare franc to visit Parisian exhibitions), his long and rigid hours made pursuing a life as an artist extremely difficult. 

 

At the age of 20, Guillaumin had saved enough money to begin attending evening classes at the Academie Suisse, a prestigious art school in the centre of Paris. Known for being an institution of nonconformists (there were no examinations, grades, or rigid instruction) it proved to be a hotbed of future Impressionist artists. While studying at the academy, Guillaumin became particularly close to Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne, with whom he would remain friends for the rest of their lives. After his training, Guillaumin began to exhibit at the Salon in 1863, but received little attention. 

 

For the next decade, he continued to paint with Cezanne and Pissarro, but was always hampered by his need to work. However, by 1874 he was a well enough known avant-garde painter that he was invited to participate as an original member of the First Impressionst Exhibition. While Guillaumin’s participation in this seismic exhibition has been overshadowed by, for example, Monet, his work from this period is striking. One of his paintings that now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, painted a year before in 1873, was shown at the exhibition and testified to his prodigious talent and nuanced understanding of light (see below). That he was able to create such an accomplished work despite his continued full-time work as a clerk, and without the same degree of training as his contemporaries, is nothing short of remarkable.   

 

The period after the First Impressionist Exhibition saw mixed success for Guillaumin. One the one hand, his art was widely celebrated, and he was particularly influential on Cezanne and Pissarro, inspiring the more structured landscapes of the former, and the bright colours of the latter. While both championed his works to dealers, the fact that he was still forced to undertake a range of clerical jobs to support his growing family hampered his ability to promote his painting commercially.

 

However, this would all change in 1891 with a stroke of almost unbelievable fortune: Guillaumin won 100,000 francs in the state lottery. While it is very difficult to calculate the relatively value of money across a 135-year period, this award can be considered to be substantially in excess of £10 million pounds today. The winnings instantly freed Guillaumin from salaried employment for the first time in his life. Without the strict hours of a railway clerk, he embarked upon a range of painting campaigns across France: the Creuse Valley, the Auvergne, and the Massif Central. These journeys resulted in some of his finest achievements, a range of paintings in the 1890s and 1900s that are so bold and highly coloured that they seem almost to anticipate the expressive intensity of Fauvism.

 

Despite his long awaited freedom from financial concerns, Guillaumin continued to live modestly and remained remarkably unaffected by this change in material circumstances: it was clear that the only use he had ever had for money was to enable him to paint.  He continued to work well into his 80s, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, while his work was quietly acquired by a range of French Museums and collectors. He died in Orly in 1927, a town where he had spent much of his final years.

 

Armand Guillaumin occupies a distinctive yet often overlooked position within the history of Impressionism. While he is by no means an unknown artist, and his works are today in almost every major collection of French painting, his celebrity has not reached the heights of his direct contemporaries like Monet or Renoir. Yet it should not be forgotten that he was an Impressionist who was there ‘from the beginning’ and whose style was marked by vigorous colour, an unwavering commitment to painting en plein air, and an unusual independence of spirit. From the 1860s, when he worked closely with Cezanne and Pissarro, to the 1890s, when he worked with young painters like Gustave Loiseau, his intense colorism and brilliant understanding of light clearly left their mark upon Impressionism. 

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