The Banks of the Marne at Charenton

Armand Guillaumin was one of the founding members of the Impressionist group, exhibiting in the first exhibition of 1874 and in every one of the eight shows the circle held before it dispersed. He painted this stretch of the river Marne at Charenton in the mid-1890s, the years when he was working regularly along the rivers and in the countryside on the southern edge of Paris and when his colour had grown freer and more saturated than that of most of his colleagues. Guillaumin had painted beside Pissarro and Cézanne at Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s, and though he never won their fame his friends regarded him as the boldest colourist among them; the dealer Ambroise Vollard was among the first to collect his work. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.