ARMAND GUILLAUMIN (1841-1927)
Village sur le Coteau, Vallée de Chevreuse
signed and dated 'Guillaumin. 85' (lower right)
oil on canvas
35 1/16 x 45 5/8 in (89 x 116 cm)
Painted circa 1885
Footnotes:
Provenance
Georges Viau Collection, Paris; his sale, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris, March 4, 1907, lot 21.
Private collection, Monte Carlo, by 1971.
René Leroux Collection, London; his sale, Sotheby's, London, December 4, 1980, lot 513.
Germann Collection, Europe (acquired at the above sale).
Private collection, Switzerland (acquired circa 1985); their sale, Sotheby's, New York, November 13, 2018, lot 128.
Acquired at the above sale by the previous owner; their sale, Christie's, New York, May 14, 2022, lot 811.
Acquired at the above sale by the previous owner; their sale, Christie's, London, March 3, 2023, lot 510.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature
D. Fabiani & G. Serret, Armand Guillaumin, 1841-1927, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1971, no. 137 (illustrated).


A founding member of the Impressionist movement, Armand Guillaumin was particularly known for his unique style of landscape painting, characterized by wide perspectives populated by meandering roads and hillsides rendered in shimmering violet and ember hues. He notably participated in the Salon des Refusés of 1863, and exhibited with the Impressionist group in their inaugural show of 1874 as well as the last held in 1886, around the time the present work was painted. Guillaumin shared many influences with his fellow artists; he cultivated a long-lasting artistic friendship with Camille Pissarro after meeting at the Academie Suisse. His studio was a meeting point for Signac and Seurat, the former recalling: 'the painter I admired most when I was twenty was Guillaumin... One day I was painting on the quays of the Île Saint-Louis. A man who was looking at my canvas over my shoulder suddenly said to me: 'That's not bad!... I do some painting myself... my name is Guillaumin' (P. Signac quoted in C. Kunstler, 'Chez Paul Signac; ou, L'Apothéose du pointillisme,' in Le Petit Parisien, April 4, 1935, p. 4).

In 1880 at the 5th edition, Guillaumin presented more than twenty landscapes depicting Paris and its region. Zola underlined in his article 'Naturalism at the Salon', published on this occasion: 'The true revolutionaries of form appear with Mr. Edouard Manet, with the impressionists Messrs. Claude Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Guillaumin and others still. They propose to leave the atelier where painters have shut themselves up for so many centuries and to go and paint in open air, a simple fact with considerable consequences. In open air, light is not fixed, but rather multiple effects change and transform radically the appearance of things and beings. This study of light [...] is what has been more or less appropriately called impressionism, because the painting then becomes the impression of a moment perceived before nature [...] Messrs. Pissarro, Sisley, Guillaumin have followed Mr. Claude Monet's steps [...] they have applied themselves to representing the pockets of nature around Paris, under true sunlight, without balking at the most improbable effects of colour' (quoted in D. Riout, Les écrivains devant l'impressionnisme, Paris, 1989, pp. 172-174).

The present canvas, depicting the environs of the Chevreuse Valley, utilizes beautifully loose Impressionist brushstrokes to describe an agricultural scene on the outskirts of late nineteenth-century Paris. Vivid blue and violet patches of sky gleam through the clouds, while nuanced shades of green and ochre form grassy hills and fields. Village sur le Coteau, Vallée de Chevreuse is a remarkable example of a truly Impressionist picture of Paris and the French countryside, showing Guillaumin's wholehearted continuation of the Impressionist style at the height of his artistic output.

The canvas is lined. Examination under Ultra-Violet light reveals: areas of retouching to all four quadrants. The colors are bright and fresh.