Artworks

 Paul Guigou (fig. 1) was one of the principle painters of the landscape of his native region of

Provence, in the south of France. Although his family wished him to become a priest or a lawyer,

he studied art with painters in Marseilles and had his first exhibition with the Société des Arts

there in 1854. In 1859 he went to Paris where he was influenced by the works of Courbet, which

gave him a sense of how to articulate space in a broad, ordered manner. During 1862 Guigou

painted the countryside of Provence with a fellow local artist, Adolphe Monticelli, and in that

same year, granted a small allowance by his parents, he settled in Paris on the rue de l’Abbaye in

Montmartre. The following year he had his first success when three of his landscapes were

accepted for the annual Salon, where he would continue to exhibit for the remainder of his career.

In 1865 he also began showing his etchings with the Société des Aquafortistes. In 1866 Guigou

made a brief trip with some other artists to Algeria, but this seems to have had little impact on his

development.

Since he returned often to his country home in le Midi , Guigou typically painted luminous

horizontal landscapes of Provençal settings, capturing the crisp light of the region with its strong,

jewel-like colors. He was aware of the developments of the Impressionists, whom he would have

met in Paris at the café Guerbois aux Batignolles, but he chose to pursue his own individual path.

He painted in and around Marseilles in the 1860s (figs. 2a-b) and throughout Provence, especially

along the banks of his favorite subject, the River Durance, which served for his 1864 Salon

submission (fig. 3). He also spent time at Mount Sainte-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence (fig. 4), a

location that later another fellow Provençal painter, Paul Cézanne, would immortalize.

The mild-mannered Guigou was a true independent devoted to his personal vision. His work

appealed to the leading promoter of the Impressionists, the critic Théodore Duret, who first met

Guigou in 1868. Following the Salon of 1870, which included the present painting, Duret wrote a

highly favorable review of the painter. Later that same year Guigou was mobilized for the Franco-

Prussian War but he saw no action. He returned from a military camp in Provence to Paris in 1871,

and because of the instability of the art market took a position as drawing master for the children

of baronne Nathaniel de Rothschild. But he sadly died shortly afterwards in Paris of a cerebral

hemorrhage, aged only thirty-seven.

At the Salon of 1870 Guigou exhibited two characteristic paintings of Provençal landscapes – the

present work and Les bords de la Durance, le matin . Like many of Guigou’s landscapes, this one

has no human presence to disturb the solitude of the calm scene, and it reveals his interest, evident

from the titles of a number of his works, in capturing the light effects of different times of day

(figs. 5-9).1  It has a purity and an integrity, a faithfulness to the harmony of nature and the beauty

of his native region that holds the viewer transfixed. The vast plain of La Crau in south-western

Provence, sometimes referred to as “the Sahara of Marseilles,"2  was described by Guigou’s first

biographer, André Gouirand , as “ a monotonous landscape…an ocean of stones stretching to the

horizon with only some rare isolated poplars.”3  But the barren, rocky open space with just a few

clusters of trees (figs. 10a-d) served to inspire several brilliant paintings by Guigou in his last

years (figs. 11-15),4  of which this is the grandest.

Clearly taken with this sunset vista he witnessed at La Crau in 1869, Guigou made two small

versions of it. The first (fig. 16),5  an oil on canvas dated 1869, is 8 ó  by 18 1/8 inches (22 by 47

cm); and then in 1870 he painted another (fig. 17)6  of nearly the same size (22.5 by 46 cm). One

can assume that the first of these small studies was made on the spot directly from nature, and then

later in the studio he painted this large version to exhibit at the Salon. For it he added greater

definition in the clouds, and the bigger size gives it more grandeur and breadth. The painting

shows a marshy pool in the foreground, which serves to lead the eye into the background where a

grove of massed trees on the right is offset by the hills at the left. The immense, glowing sky with

clouds tinged pink by the setting sun and with a flight of birds dominates the composition. The

sunset is reflected in the water, and the whole is infused with a silent, uplifting freshness of vision.

Evident of his devotion to this subject, Guigou also made an etching of the painting (fig. 18),

which was likewise exhibited at the 1870 Salon but he did not publish it.7

 Duret’s article on Guigou following the Salon of 1870 remains one of the best analysis of the

painter’s style:

Paul Guigou…has succeeded in painting landscapes in which the sincerity of tones and

the accenting of colors has now blended into a harmonious effect. At this year’s

Salon…he excels at extending a perspective and at arranging the middle grounds against

a well composed distant background. Painting by preference the Provençal landscape,

nude and desolate, he knows how to compensate for the aridity of the sites by his manner

of using direct accents to render the coloring of the water, rocks, mountains and by the

bright, lively light that he projects on to the countryside. Most of our northern French

landscape painters depict woods and groups of trees under which we can feel the coolness

of the shade. Guigou, because in Provence, there are few trees and limited amounts of

foliage, paints space and distance, and creates on his canvas deep horizons.8

 Guigou’s work with its dedication to Provence is the painterly counterpoint to the poetic

evocations of the region by the famed Nobel-Prize winning writer Frédéric Mistral, who may

earlier in his life have met Guigou and observed in 1908:

I consider Paul Guigou the greatest painter of Provence. No one could paint better than he the

luminosity of our beautiful land, the rugged poetry of its rocky and powdery soil. With great

sincerity of vision, he made a truthful and faithful portrait of his little nation. He does not yet have

the place in the world of art which he deserves, but that will come.9

 And he has indeed been rediscovered! Of his nearly 450 paintings, there are now examples by him

in the museums of Boston, Cleveland, Seattle, and Chicago (fig. 3), as well as the National Gallery

of Art, Washington, D.C., the Hood Museum, and three at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

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