Scene on the Seine

Armand Guillaumin was born in Paris in February 1841 to a family aspiring to secure a position amidst the lower tiers of the rapidly growing middle class. Soon after Armand’s birth, his family moved to Moulins. At the age of fifteen, having completed his academic studies and some art training undertaken at his own initiative, Armand was sent back to the French capital to work in his uncle’s garment shop. Settling in a bustling center of art and culture was a significant step for a youngster who dreamt of becoming a painter. In the absence of any financial backing, Armand was compelled to pursue his dream through a series of compromises. Between 1857 and the late 1880s, he earned a modest income from various working-class jobs while painting only in his spare time, typically in the early mornings or during the weekends when Parisians of all political stripes flocked to the city’s outskirts to connect with nature. In the 1860s, Guillaumin befriended Cézanne, Pissarro, and other young artists orbiting around Edouard Manet. While unable to dedicate as much time to painting as many of his friends, Guillaumin participated in most of the significant ventures undertaken by the Parisian avant-garde in the 1860s and 70s: he sent works to the Salon des Refusés of 1863, in which Manet debuted his notorious Déjeuner sur l’Herbe; he was a regular at Café de Bade and Café de Guerbois, the hangouts of the burgeoning Impressionist group; he was a founding member of the Societé anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. that organized the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; and he took part in all but two of the subsequent seven Impressionist exhibitions. In 1887, Guillaumin married his cousin Joséphine Charreton, an alliance that improved his finances considerably. Four years later, he won a large sum of money in the national lottery, became financially independent, and was finally able to dedicate himself solely to art. The heyday of Impressionism had passed, but Guillaumin remained committed to many of its aesthetic principles until his death in 1927.Two important examples of Guillaumin’s Impressionism belong to the Israel Museum’s collection. The earlier of these, Scene on the Seine, dates from the first half of the 1880s, most likely 1882, the year of the seventh Impressionist exhibition. This painting, like many others by Guillaumin, hovers between landscape and genre scene. Unlike the other Impressionists, who preferred to portray the river Seine either in its quasi-romantic solitude or as a cozy staging ground for bourgeois leisure, Guillaumin weds the river to hard labor. In the foreground workers unload cargo from one of the many barges that sailed daily between the provinces and Paris, capitalizing on the city’s insatiable hunger for growth. Behind the workers, dredgers scoop sand and mud from the riverbed to clear it for the safe passage of a growing fleet of barges. The scene reveals Guillaumin’s interest in the impact that industrialization and urbanization have on a city’s undefined periphery. Suburbia proved an ideal staging ground for the type of social Impressionism Guillaumin pioneered: a place where city and nature collided and landscapes were in a constant process of becoming something other.