Antoine Guillemet (1841-1918) was a French landscape painter who occupied a genuinely pivotal position at the transition between Realism and Impressionism, remembered today as much for his central role within the circle of artists who created Impressionism as for his own considerable body of work. Born in Chantilly, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder from Rouen, he studied under Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whom the young artists of his generation affectionately called "Papa," and through Corot's pupil Achille Oudinot he was drawn into the milieu of Auvers-sur-Oise, meeting Charles-François Daubigny and other established landscape painters. By 1864 Guillemet had also become close to Édouard Manet, Alfred Stevens, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet and Paul Cézanne, and it was Guillemet who first introduced Manet to Cézanne and who took the young writer Émile Zola to Manet's studio, connections that placed him at the very centre of the group that would transform French painting.
Guillemet's own friendship with Manet was memorialised when the older painter included him, standing in the background beside Berthe Morisot, in his celebrated and controversial 1869 painting The Balcony, now in the Musée d'Orsay. Despite these close ties to the emerging Impressionists, Guillemet chose to continue exhibiting at the official Paris Salon rather than joining his friends at the independent Impressionist exhibitions, a decision that may have owed something to his early Salon success: his nine-foot-wide Bercy en décembre was purchased by the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. He went on to serve for many years as a jury member of the Salon des Artistes Français, painting large panoramic views of Paris along the Seine and, from 1881, the beaches and landscapes of Normandy, and was formally recognised with numerous state honours during his lifetime, including appointment as a Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur. When Cézanne finally exhibited at the Salon in 1882, he did so listed as a "pupil of Guillemet," a rare official credential for an artist otherwise associated almost entirely with the independent Impressionist exhibitions.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings of Guillemet, including river and coastal views around Normandy, reflect the plein-air, atmospheric landscape practice for which he was admired throughout a long and materially successful career, one that has, like those of several Barbizon and plein-air contemporaries, come to be somewhat overshadowed in the twentieth century by the fame of the Impressionist circle within which he moved so centrally.