Armand Guillaumin (1841 – 1927) was a French lithographer and impressionist painter. He worked at his uncle's lingerie shop while he was attending evening drawing lessons. He studied at Académie Suisse after working for a French government railway for some time. At the institution, he met Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne with whom he maintained lifelong friendships. Though Guillaumin never achieved the status of these two artists, his influence on their work was significant. For example, Paul attempted his first etching based on Guillaumin’s paintings of barges on the River Seine. Guillamin is noted for his use of intense colors. His paintings are represented in major museums around the world. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l'Estérel in the Provence region of France. Guillamin was called the leader of a diverse group of painters, the École de Crozant, who came to depict the landscape in the region around the village of Crozant.
One of these depictions is housed in the Chicago Institute of Arts. In 1863, he exhibited at the Salon des Refusés. From 1874 to 1886, he participated in 6 out of the 8 Impressionist exhibitions. In 1886 he married Marie-Joséphine Charreton, his cousin who was a school teacher and who supported him financially since by then he could not earn a living from painting. His paintings became more subjective in the 1890s, and he started using very expressive colors, and soon he was anticipating the Fauves. Come 1891 Guillaumin gained at the National Lottery, and this enabled him to concentrate on his painting and to move regularly between Saint-Pala is-sure-Mar Agway and Crozant, as well as travelling to Holland.
