Antoine Guillemet (1843–1918)

ANTOINE GUILLEMET (1843–1918)
Paris: La Seine à Conflans-Charenton, 1891
Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 78 3/4 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): A. Guillemet. 1891.

RECORDED: Armand Sylvestre, “Le Salon de 1892, Champs-Elysées,” in L’Echo de Paris: Supplément illustré (May 1, 1892) // A. Dalligny, “Le Salon de 1892, Peinture salle XXVI,” in Le Journal des Arts (May 13, 1892), p. 1 // Charles Yriarte, “Le Salon des Champs-Elysées, La Peinture,” in Le Figaro: Supplement littéraire (April 29, 1893), p. 3 // J. P. Crespelle, Les Maitres de la Belle Epoque (1966), p. 47 no. 63a illus.

EXHIBITED: Palais des Champs-Elysées, Paris, 1892, Salon, no. 823 illus. // Exposition universelle de 1900, Paris, illustrated in Catalogue official illustré de l’Exposition Decennale des Beaux-arts de 1889–1900, p. 54 no. 954 // John Mitchell and Son, London, 1998, Antoine Guillemet 1841–1918, p. 6 no. 2, illus. in color // Stair-Sainty Matthiesen Gallery, New York, October–December 1999, The Gallic Prospect: French Landscape Painting, 1785–1900, pp. 180 no. 36, 181 illus.

EX COLL.: private collection, Paris; to [John Mitchell & Son, London], 1998; to [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1998]; to private collection, 2000 until the present

Paris: La Seine à Conflans-Charenton was exhibited in the Salon of 1892 to great public and critical praise. In the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, Lafenestre described Guillemet “as the real heir to the great school of landscape, this man, grandson of Daubigny, nephew of Vollon, if you wish, above all himself, is one of the best painters of Nature at this time.” The measure of Guillemet’s success with this painting may be seen in the fact that he then submitted paintings of major scale depicting Paris to the successive Salons of 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1897. It was perhaps this series that caused the writer Charles Yriarte to call Guillemet, “one of the official painters of Paris.” 

If the mantle of heir to Daubigny and Vollon was suggested by Guillemet’s accurate depiction of the péniches, barges, and steamers which plied the Seine, then his acknowledged status as the contemporary painter of Paris par excellence is visible in his depiction of Paris’s bridges, its growing sprawl, and the Eiffel Tower, at the time only two years old, in the distance.

Paris: La Seine à Conflans-Charenton appeared once more, at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, before disappearing for almost one hundred years, only recently being re-discovered in a private collection.