For more than fifty years John Mitchell Fine Paintings has specialised in the paintings of Antoine Guillemet, the Normandy-born Impressionist. The firm has hosted three major exhibitions of his work since the 1980s and has been responsible for the rediscovery of several of Guillemet’s two-metre Salon paintings, including three panoramic views of Paris (see p. 37). Guillemet came from a family of wealthy Normandy shipowners and had wanted to go to sea as a boy. His father did not allow it and, as he often told art critics, he had instead to content himself with painting the sea and shore, the river and its banks. Under the guidance of Corot, to whom he was devoted, Guillemet submitted his first Salon exhibits in the 1860s. Although Corot is always referred to as his teacher, Guillemet was eager to learn from others as well. He delighted in going out painting on the Seine with the Daubignys in their quaint floating studio called Le Bottin, with ‘Father’ at his easel and young Karl Daubigny at the oars. Undoubtedly, he was impressed by the vigorous grandeur of Courbet’s work. Amid these different experiences, the influence of Manet was decisive, and the ambitious landscape painter made friends with an exceptionally wide circle of artists through the famous Café Guerbois meetings of the 1860s. Most of his contemporaries were the future Impressionists. However, when in 1874 they decided to exhibit independently of the official Salon, in the face of constant rejection, Guillemet, like Manet, preferred to keep to traditional paths. When repeated successes at the Salon won a place on the Salon jury for Guillemet in 1881, it gave him the right to introduce one painter without opposition. He seized the chance for Paul Cézanne and thus the painter from Aix-en-Provence, destined for greatness, exhibited at the Salon for his one and only time, listed as a pupil of Guillemet. When Guillemet became one of the establishment figures, with high rank in the Legion of Honour, many Salon medals and several paintings in French museums, he was always respected because of his encouragement to others. Indeed, Guillemet could also count Édouard Manet, Alfred Stevens, the Morisots and, closest of all, Émile Zola among his friends. But appearances were deceptive. Although his winters were spent in Paris, where his wit and charm were as highly prized as his paintings, every summer he would leave for six months to make his home among the oyster gatherers and fishermen on the Normandy coast, nearly always on the Cotentin Peninsula near Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue. Dressed in a shabby smock and boots, the familiar tall figure must have resembled something of a weather-beaten and distracted recluse, with his easel and paint box in tow.