Westcoast Fine Art has dated this Impressionist Oil Landscape Painting to the 19th Century.
Title: Sur Le Danube
Medium: Oil on canvas
Provenance: From a private London collection.
Signed lower right-hand side.
Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin was a French lithographer and painter who was part of the Impressionist movement. Known for his landscapes and bold colors, Guillaumin was the last survivor of those who participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, dying the year after Monet. One of his paintings of the river Seine was the basis for his good friend Paul Cézanne's first lithograph.
Possibly the least well known of the group of impressionist painters who worked in and around the Parisian art scene of the late 19th century, he was nonetheless one of the most accomplished in terms of his technical ingenuity and uniqueness. He had a significant influence on a number of very important contemporaries including Cézanne and Pissaro, and his work was highly regarded and confirmed thus by Vincent Van Gogh.
The record sale for the artist work at auction to date was for Chemin à Damiette, 1885 which sold for 335,500 euros in 2014 at Christie's Paris.
The painting offered is from the late 19th to early 20th century. We think that it was most likely composed around 1895. The subject is reminiscent of other nautical themed works by the artist, and like many of his accomplished colleagues he was also attracted to water and thematic compositions surrounding it. The piece offered is very typical of the painters work of the period and is typically bold in its use of tonality and colour. This is counterbalanced with the deftness of brush stroke, some of which is highly subtle in its interwoven elements, capturing the light on the river Danube with a single mast moored ship alongside a balconied terracotta faced villa.
In the background we see a close study of the opposite shoreline with a harmonious mix of landscape and buildings and a continuum of form and structure in the work so typical of the painter's oeuvre.
A beautifully balanced composition from this very well collected artist which is signed lower right.
The artists work is highly sought after and very well collected and to illustrate this a similar sized painting "Le pont Charraud, matin" (oil on canvas) sold only a couple of weeks ago ( 3/04/2025) at Bonhams for £25,600.
Biography:
Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin was born Paris. He worked at his uncle's while attending evening drawing lessons as well as for a French government railway before studying at the Académie Suisse in 1861.
Here he met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, with whom he maintained lifelong friendships. While he never achieved the stature of these two, his influence on their work was significant. Guillaumin exhibited with both Cézanne and Pissaro at the Salon des Refusés in 1863.
The three artists frequently painted in alongside each other in the 1870s and for a period for a Guillaumin and Cézanne had studios next door to each other on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris.
In 1873, Cézanne made the only etchings of his career, one of them depicting Guillaumin.
Guillaumin was a member of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (later dubbed Impressionistes) from the start and he participated in six of the eight Impressionist exhibitions: 1874, 1877, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886.
In the eyes of contemporary critics, he became known for his defined brushstrokes and use of bold colours. In 1886, an astute critic, Félix Fénéon, called him a "furious colourist". By the 1890s, his palette had grown even bolder, less faithful and he had been described as a "Fauve" a decade before Fauvism.
Westcoast Fine Art has dated this Impressionist Oil Landscape Painting to the 19th Century.
Westcoast fine art ltd is a UK based dealer in fine classical works of art.
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Sur Le Danube, Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927)
