Crozant and the Creuse Hills, Rainy Evening

“I believe that Guillaumin’s ideas as an artist were more developed than those of others, and that if everybody else were like him, we would produce more good things and be less inclined to fight amongst ourselves.” These words of Vincent van Gogh convey the admiration he felt for the artist. Armand Guillaumin was equally esteemed by his peers, who, through his example, often discovered new paths in modern painting. Guillaumin participated in the first Impressionist exhibition, held in the former studio of the photographer Nadar in 1874. Indeed, the artist, who died seven months after Claude Monet, in 1927, was the group’s longest lasting survivor. When he first met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, it was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration and friendship. The saturated palette of this canvas, freed from a purely mimetic relationship with nature and with its predominant purple and contrasting green, establishes Guillaumin as a precursor of the Fauve painters.