Vente Paris, Palais Galliera, Ader Picard, 5 décembre 1968, lot 43 (115.000 frs.)

Vente Paris, Me Yann Le Mouel, 14 février 2023, lot 89

Acquis lors de cette vente par l'actuel propriétaire

Collection Louis Grandchamp des Raux

Paris, Pavillon de la ville de Paris (Champs-Élysées), Salon des Indépendants, 6e exposition, mars-avril 1890, n° 416 p. 22, (titrée Femme et enfant dans une prairie)

La Gazette Drouot, n° 2, 13 janvier 2023, reproduit en couleur en couverture et p.6

Cette œuvre sera incluse au second volume du Catalogue Raisonné Armand Guillaumin, actuellement en préparation par le Comité Guillaumin (Stéphanie Chardeau-Botteri, Dominique Fabiani, Jacques de la Béraudière).

Un certificat du Comité Armand Guillaumin sera remis à l'acquéreur.

A bold colourist from the first generation of Impressionists, Armand Guillaumin painted landscapes in dazzling, vibrant colours.

In 1890, the year our painting was created, Guillaumin took part in the Salon des Indépendants, founded in 1884 by Georges Seurat, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Paul Signac and Odilon Redon to provide artists with an exhibition space without an admissions jury.

Of the four rooms in the Pavillon des Champs-Élysées reserved for artists rejected by the official Salon – the “Refusés” – one was dedicated to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Alongside Seurat, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, Guillaumin exhibited ten paintings – the maximum number allowed – including this one.

In this landscape, in a rare vertical format, the artist depicts a woman helping her young child take their first steps in the middle of a field of dazzling colours. This could represent his wife, Marie-Joséphine Gareton, and their daughter Madeleine Julie, born in 1888. The curves in the composition, linking the path, the tree branches and the moving clouds, convey the harmonious vibrancy of nature. Working from life, Guillaumin here seeks to create a colourful and emotional symphony, where pure tones, applied in juxtaposed brushstrokes, give rise to a vibrant light that already foreshadows Fauvism.

Guillaumin presents us with a scene of great tenderness, in which the child’s awakening converges with that of nature. In this luminous countryside, radiant nature sings a hymn to life, where colour becomes the true language of emotion. Until 1893, the year he settled in the Creuse, his work was often compared to that of Claude Monet (ill. 1), with whom he shared a taste for plein air painting, a luminous palette and rapid, hatched brushstrokes.

Fig. 1 : Claude Monet, Femme à l’ombrelle, Madame Monet et son fils, ou La Promenade, 1875, huile sur toile, National Gallery of Art, Washington