Born in Chantilly, Normandy, Guillemet showed an early interest in sailing, a pursuit which was actively discouraged by his parents. He briefly studied law, but this too proved to be a false start. It was a local commission in 1859 to copy Gericault’s famous The Raft of the Medusa (Musée d’Amiens, France), which truly launched Guillemet on his life’s pursuit as an artist.
Two years later, while only twenty-one, Guillemet met through Berthe Morisot the great master of the nineteenth-century landscape, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Like many of the young artists, Guillemet affectionately called Corot “Papa” and remained a lifelong admirer of the artist. This meeting led to Guillemet’s studying with Corot’s pupil Achille Oudinot, and it was through Oudinot, who had property at Auvers-sur-Oise, that Guillemet met Daubigny, Jean Meissonier, Honore Daumier, and Antoine-Louis Barye, among others. By 1864 Guillemet had also encountered Edouard Manet, Alfred Stevens, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, and Paul Cézanne, and later, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas, and Frederic Bazille. It was Guillemet, in fact, who introduced Manet to Cézanne and who first took Émile Zola to Manet’s studio.
Like any ambitious artist at the time, Guillemet looked to Paris to prove his worth, and in 1865 debuted at the Salon with his painting L’Etang de Bât (Isère). Just as Paris was important as a venue for the artist to exhibit his work, it also provided inspiration as a subject. He painted large panoramic views of the capital city from various sites, most often using the Seine with its bustling traffic as a central motif. This is not surprising, considering the artist’s love of Paris and the fact that this Parisian series began in 1874 with a dramatic success. Guillemet’s ambitious Salon entry of that year was a nine-foot-wide painting titled Bercy en décembre, which was praised by both critics and the public and which was purchased by the state for the Musée de Luxembourg, the national museum for contemporary art. (The painting is now at the Musée d'Orsay.) This early success may also explain why the artist continued to exhibit at the Salon instead of accepting the invitation to exhibit at the first Impressionist show. Guillemet continued to paint coastal scenes in Normandy, but buoyed by his initial success, he returned throughout his career to painting views of Paris, continuing to be successful with state purchases, medals, and with the consistent praise of his friend, Émile Zola.
In the important Exposition Universelle of 1889, celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution, Guillemet was represented by no less than seven paintings, including Le Vieux Quai de Bercy and Paris, vue prise de Meudon. In 1891 Guillemet painted a view up the Seine from the sight of these pictures towards the eastern end of the Quai de Bercy titled Le Quai de Bercy-Charenton, which was purchased by the Musée de la Ville de Paris, now the Musée Carnavalet.
During his lifetime, Antoine Guillemet garnished almost every medal, honor, and distinction available to the nineteenth-century French artist. It is unfortunate that his fame, along with that of many of the great Barbizon and plein-air painters, became obscured throughout much of the twentieth century, overshadowed by the popular glare of the Impressionists and of Modernism. His rediscovery as one of the great masters of landscape painting in nineteenth-century France has, in fact, been a relatively recent occurrence.
