Armand Guillaumin, Moret-sur-Loing, Evening Effect, No. 2, ca. 1902

Moret-sur-Loing, a picturesque town on the Loing River about forty miles southeast of Paris, is celebrated for its medieval architecture, stone mills, and avenues of poplars lining the riverbanks. Its scenic charm attracted numerous artists, most famously Alfred Sisley (English, born Paris, 1839–99), who immortalized the Gothic church of Notre-Dame and the bustling river scenes in a series of works from 1889 until his death in 1899. His prolific depictions of these sites from various vantage points inspired other painters who followed, including Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Claude Monet (1840–1926). Like Sisley and Monet, Armand Guillaumin embraced the concept of serial compositions, exploring a single motif through the changing effects of light and weather.

Guillaumin’s Moret-sur-Loing, Evening Effect, No. 2 pictures the view from the east bank of the Loing, looking south or upstream toward the stone-arch bridge known as the Pont de Moret. It is highly likely, given the canvas’s relatively modest scale and the artist’s preference for working en plein air, that he realized the composition directly in front of his subject. Near the center of the bridge stands the Provencher mill,¹ consisting of the pair of large buildings seen at center left in the composition. The bridge enters the once-walled town at the Porte de Bourgogne, the tall tower with a poplar tree in front of it, at right. The belfry of Notre-Dame is visible at the far right of the composition.

Painted on a standard size-15 canvas (65 x 54 cm) that was small enough to facilitate working directly outdoors, the Nelson-Atkins landscape belongs to a subgroup of six works realized from similar vantage points. A smaller, more loosely handled version (Fig. 1) is likely a preparatory study, while another canvas with autumnal trees shows a vantage point slightly leftward, shifting the town into the distant right (or west) corner (Fig. 2). All three works include a diagonal footbridge spanning the foreground. In contrast, Moret, The Morning, or The Old Samois (Fig. 3), The Old Samois (Fig. 4),² and a larger canvas at the Tate (Fig. 5) omit the footbridge and move closer to the town, adding boaters or tethered boats indicating proximity to the Matrat Boatyard.³ The Nelson-Atkins painting notably omits the fisherman seen in figures 3 and 4, focusing instead on the architecture and vibrant reflections of light in the Loing river. Both Moret, The Morning, or The Old Samois (Fig. 3) and the Nelson-Atkins composition were included in the Henri Vian sale at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1919 as lots 13 and 14 respectively.⁴ The collector and metalsmith Henri Séraphin Louis Vian (1858–1904) and his wife, Louise Vian (née Brousse, 1866–1914), most likely acquired the canvases directly from the artist, considering the short window between their date of execution in 1902 and Henri’s death in 1904.⁵ Given the verso inscription on the Nelson-Atkins canvas—“Soir, no. 2” (Evening, no. 2)—and the fact that it is the same canvas size as the morning scene, it is almost certain that Guillaumin considered them pendants, suggesting a pairing intended to capture the contrasting moods of morning and evening.

Guillaumin’s biographers and scholars have made various attempts to date the canvases, offering a range of possibilities from 1895 to 1902. However, given the compositional similarities among this subgroup of six canvases, Guillaumin probably painted all of them during a single visit to Moret-sur-Loing. A firmly inscribed date on one Moret canvas outside of this subgroup places him there in May 1902, offering crucial evidence for the chronology of his paintings.⁷ Furthermore, an article authored in 1914 (during the artist’s lifetime) includes a reproduction of The Old Samois (Fig. 4) and dates it 1902.⁸ Additionally, a letter from the artist’s daughter, Marguerite, in 1954 recalls her presence in Moret in 1902, during a period of convalescence, noting that her father joined her there to keep her company.⁹

While Guillaumin’s mastery of color and composition demonstrate his aesthetic preoccupations, these works also reveal deeper thematic interests. In particular, his depictions of Moret-sur-Loing reflect an enduring concern with labor and industry, elements that are subtly integrated in the Nelson-Atkins composition.¹⁰ The Provencher mill, which once harnessed the Loing’s current, and the washhouse where women laundered clothes (the orange barge with blue roof seen in the water at distant back right) reflect the working river’s historical significance. Unlike the riverscapes of Monet¹¹ and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), where leisure dominates, Guillaumin’s focus on different elements underscores his commitment to a working-class narrative, a perspective shaped by his socialist convictions and longstanding friendship with Pissarro. Many of these same motifs of work and industry appear in the group of paintings Pissarro produced while in Moret in 1901 and 1902.¹² In fact, some of their vantage points are so close, it suggests that Pissarro and Guillaumin may have been painting together, as they had done in the 1870s in Pontoise and Auvers.¹³

At the time of his 1902 visit to Moret, Guillaumin was sixty-one years old, while Pissarro was seventy-two. The two artists shared a deep friendship, having met in the 1860s at the Académie Suisse, where they were joined by other key figures of the emerging Impressionist group, including Paul Cezanne (1839–1906).¹⁴ While Pissarro started out as a mentor to the junior Guillaumin, their relationship evolved over the years, and he came to solicit Guillaumin’s opinion of his works.¹⁵ Pissarro had visited Moret several times, particularly in 1899, 1901, and—most importantly for the present essay—May of 1902, to visit his son Georges, who moved there in 1899. Given their longstanding bond, Guillaumin’s decision to paint in Moret was likely motivated, at least in part, by the opportunity to reconnect with his old friend. Indeed, Pissarro’s eldest son, Lucien, recognized how special it was to spend time with fellow artists, imploring his father to “tell Georges I’m terribly jealous—Oh well, it’s damn tempting to spend some time together between painters!!”¹⁶ Lucien’s comment highlights the camaraderie and inspiration shared among these painters, a dynamic that may have drawn Guillaumin to Moret in search of both artistic renewal and companionship. Pissarro died the following year, making this an especially poignant reunion—one of the last moments the two could share their artistic dialogue in person. In this light, Moret-sur-Loing and its pendant take on a deeper resonance, not only as vibrant explorations of color and atmosphere but also as quiet testaments to friendship, memory, and the enduring creative bonds that shaped Guillaumin’s career.

Notes

1. The mill was reduced to its foundation and waterwheel following World War II; see Sylvie Patin’s catalogue entry for “The Provencher Watermill at Moret,” in Alfred Sisley, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1992), 204, no. 55.

2. See Georges Serret and Dominique Fabiani, Armand Guillaumin, 1841–1927: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (Paris: Mayer, 1971), nos. 502, 503. Although the Nelson-Atkins painting is not included in the first volume of Guillaumin’s catalogue raisonné, it will be featured in a forthcoming supplement.

3. See, for example, Alfred Sisley, The Matrat Boatyard, Moret-sur-Loing, Rainy Weather, 1892, oil on canvas, 23 7/8 x 29 1/8 in. (60.7 x 74 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1983.53.7, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/26800.

4. See Catalogue de tableaux modernes, aquarelles, pastels, dessins . . . Composant la Collection de M. Henri Vian . . . Par suite du décès de Mme Vian (Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1919), lots 13 and 14.

5. Theo van Gogh was Guillaumin’s dealer until Theo’s death in 1891. Thereafter, Guillaumin was known to sell through Galerie Durand-Ruel. The author checked with the Durand-Ruel archives; however, there is no record of this painting having been handled by that firm. See correspondence from Flavie Durand-Ruel to Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, April 3, 2021; copy in NAMA curatorial file.

6. Guillaumin included a handwritten inscription, “ne pas vernir” (do not varnish), on the verso of another Moret painting from 1902. See Armand Guillaumin, Moret sur Loing, 1902, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 26 in. (55.5 x 66 cm), sold at Bonham’s, Paris, “Impressionist and Modern Art Online,” April 22–May 2, 2024, lot 1, https://www.bonhams.com/auction/29891/lot/1/armand-guillaumin-1841-1927-moret-sur-loing. Guillaumin and many fellow Impressionists, including his lifelong friend Camille Pissarro, preferred to leave their canvases unvarnished. Pissarro included a similar verso note not to varnish his 1880 painting Landscape at Chaponval (1880; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). See David Bomford et al., Art in the Making: Impressionism (London: Yale University Press, 1991), 101. For more on this preference by impressionist artists to leave their pictures unvarnished, see also Michael Swicklick, “French Painting and the Use of Varnish, 1750–1900,” Conservation Research: Studies in the History of Art 41, no. 2 (1993): 168–69; Anthea Callen, “The Unvarnished Truth: Mattness, ‘Primitivism,’ and Modernity in French Painting, c. 1870–1907,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1100 (November 1994): 738.

7. The painting cited in n. 6 (which sold at Bonham’s, Paris, “Impressionist and Modern Art Online,” April 22–May 2, 2024, lot 1) is also inscribed on a verso stretcher, “Moret, Mai 1902, matin.”

8. See Charles Louis Borgmeyer, “Armand Guillaumin (Chapter X: ‘The Master Impressionists’),” Fine Arts Journal 30, no. 2 (February 1914): 57.

9. Guillaumin’s widow and their daughter Marguerite, who was born in 1893 and would have been nine years old in 1902, were certain Guillaumin was in Moret in 1902. In an unidentified letter, Marguerite wrote that “as child, I was there convalescing, and my father, who was an excellent father, installed himself there at the time not to leave me on my own.” See Marguerite Guillaumin to unspecified recipient, December 12, 1954, quoted and translated in Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art Other than Works by British Artists (London: Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1981), 345.

10. For more on this broader theme of urbanization and industrialization in Impressionist painting, see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 70.

11. Admittedly, Monet, who came from a seaport town, understood working ports and included many in his paintings (as well as other examples of industry); however, Rubin argues that Guillaumin “was instrumental in introducing the theme [of industrial waterways] to Impressionist painting.” Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape, 70.

12. See Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, trans. Mark Hutchinson and Michael Taylor (Paris: Wildenstein Institute Publications, 2005), nos. 1367–1369, 1431–1435, pp. 3:840–41, 874–76.

13. Camille Pissarro, Banks of the Loing, Moret, ca. 1902, oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65 x 81 cm), private collection; see Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, no. 1435, p. 3:876. See also Armand Guillaumin, Moret sur Loing, cited in n. 6.

14. Paul Cezanne painted with Pissarro and Guillaumin in Pointoise and Auvers in the 1870s. See John Rewald, “Cézanne and Guillaumin,” in Études d’art français offertes à Charles Sterling, ed. Charles Sterling, Albert Châtelet, and Nicole Reynaud (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975), 343–53.

15. See Aimee Marcereau DeGalan’s entry for Camille Pissarro’s Poplars, Sunset at Eragny in this volume.

16. “Georges est rudiment veinard de t’avoir pour lui tout seul–dis lui que je suis attrocement jaloux—C’est égal, c’est bougrement tentant de passer quelque temps ensemble entre peintres!!” (author’s own translation). Lucien Pissarro to Camille Pissarro, June 27, 1901, cited in Anne Thorold, ed., The Letters of Lucien to Camille Pissarro, 1883–1903 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 695–96.

Moret-sur-Loing, Evening Effect, No. 2 was executed on an extremely fine, tightly woven plain-weave canvas with a selvedge on the right edge. The thin, evenly applied white ground extends to the tacking margins and the excess canvas that wraps around to the stretcher reverse, with the exception of the right selvedge (Fig. 6). Vacant tack holes along the unprimed section of the right edge relate to the stretching of a significantly larger canvas in preparation for commercial priming.¹ The canvas was cut from this larger piece and stretched across a standard-format no. 15 figure, rotated ninety degrees.² No colorman stamps are present on the reverse to confirm its origin.³

The canvas is attached to its original five-member stretcher with a vertical crossbar. A cursive, charcoal inscription on the top stretcher member reads, “Soir G[or S?] . . . [?]^o 2” indicating that the painting was executed in the evening and after the completion of another work (Fig. 7). Guillaumin depicted five other paintings in this location, including The Old Samois (Fig. 1) and The Jetty (Fig. 2),⁴ though an established chronology for this group cannot be determined from the artist’s inscriptions. None appear on the reverse of The Jetty, and little information is currently known about The Old Samois.⁵

Stereomicroscopic examination of the Nelson-Atkins painting shows the presence of charcoal particles along the edge of compositional features (Fig. 8).⁶ Infrared reflectography (IRR) reveals underdrawing lines that roughly delineate the edge of the right trees, central buildings, and the pillars supporting the diagonal bridge (Fig. 9).⁷

The presence of wet-over-dry brushwork confirms that Guillaumin executed Moret-sur-Loing, Evening Effect, No. 2 in a few painting sessions, beginning with the sky and progressing forward, with the foreground painted last. Using a 1/2-inch brush, Guillaumin captured the sunset with largely diagonal, slightly curving, streaky brushstrokes, allowing glimpses of the ground layer to function as a mid-tone. This striated effect is interrupted twice by overlapping circular strokes of thicker, opaque paint, applied wet-over-wet (Fig. 10).

Transmitted light shows that Guillaumin left reserves for the different compositional elements with no overlap, except for the innermost deciduous tree, where the thinly painted sky extends beneath its foliage (Fig. 11). Due to this overlap, the treatment of sky differs subtly between the right and left bank of trees (Fig. 12); for the left trees, passages of sky remain visible through deliberate gaps in the brushwork, whereas the right trees consist of dabs of pink paint, applied over green, blue, and purple passages. Guillaumin later made minor refinements wet-over-wet to the right trees by reintroducing more sky paint to soften and reduce the foliage edges (Fig. 13).

Similar to the sky, Guillaumin left the ground exposed as a mid-tone between the varying paint applications in the waterway. The right side of waterway was formed by layering vertical strokes wet-over-dry and wet-over-wet to suggest reflection of the trees. Drier, paste-like paint was applied in repetitive horizontal strokes to indicate the water, an approach later repeated in the foreground. Reflected buildings are rendered in thick impasto, while smaller trees are suggested through vertical applications of fluid paint. Throughout the waterway, the ground remains visible between adjacent and within individual strokes, contributing to the suggestion of a reflected sunset.

Guillaumin built up the painted surface in the remaining areas of the landscape using a combination of wet-over-dry, wet-over-wet, and wet-into-wet applications. While some paint colors intermingled directly on the canvas during application, Guillaumin’s brush occasionally contained partially mixed paint, resulting in multiple colors within individual strokes; this can be seen in the buildings, trees, and water in the foreground (Fig. 14). Some of the buildings were blocked in and established with additions of paint, while others were rapidly modeled within a single painting session. These passages display pronounced contrasts in paint thickness, ranging from thin, fluid layers to heavily bodied impasto (Fig. 15). In the trees, Guillaumin first laid in smooth, relatively flat areas of paint to establish overall form, followed by repetitive directional brushwork to suggest leaves. The left bank of trees is characterized by a more tactile surface, consisting of short horizontal strokes and dabs applied both wet-over-wet and wet-over-dry to suggest individual leaves. Wispy, curving strokes were later added to articulate minor branches within the foliage of different trees. In the final stage, Guillaumin executed the bridge with diagonal strokes of paste-like paint while slightly more fluid paint was layered wet-into-wet and wet-over-dry to model the supporting piers below.

The unlined painting is in excellent condition. The painting was treated at least once prior to its acquisition by the Nelson-Atkins in 2021. There are a few scattered losses and minor abrasion throughout the composition. The painting has a synthetic varnish with minor retouching present in the sky. Given Guillaumin’s clearly stated views on varnishing⁸ and the discolored state of the varnish, the landscape is earmarked for future treatment.

Notes

1. David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton, and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism (London: Yale University Press, 1991), 48.

2. For standard canvas sizes, see Bomford et al., Art in the Making: Impressionism, 46.

3. Tasset et L’Hôte were active from 1887 to 1899; see Pascal Labreuche, “Tasset et Lhote,” Guide Labreuche: Guide historique des fournisseurs de matériel pour artistes à Paris 1790–1960, 2018, https://www.guide-labreuche.com/en/collection/marks-collection/tasset-et-lhote. Guillaumin continued to use materials purchased from Tasset et L’Hôte after the business closed, as he used a ready-made canvas from the colormen to execute The Barges (Les Péniches) (Musee Bonnat-Helleu) in 1904; see Sophia Boosalis, “Armand Guillaumin, Morning, Rouen, 1904,” technical entry in this catalogue, https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.623.2088. There are no colorman stamps of the reverse of The Jetty. See correspondence from Rosalyn Goulding, curator, National Trust for Scotland, to Sophia Boosalis, November 3, 2025, NAMA conservation file, 2021.16.1.

4. See the accompanying catalogue entry by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan.

5. Guillaumin often noted the date, time, weather, and location on reverse of his paintings to maintain consistency across successive painting sessions. These inscriptions often serve as the primary method for establishing the chronology of Guillaumin’s paintings that capture the same viewpoint. See Christopher Gray, Armand Guillaumin (Chester, CT: Pequot Press, 1972), 58. See also Boosalis, “Armand Guillaumin, Morning, Rouen, 1904.” For information regarding the The Jetty, see correspondence from Goulding to Boosalis, November 3, 2025.

6. Guillaumin is known to have made minimal underdrawings prior to executing other paintings en plain air like Landscape, Ivry-sur-Seine (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ca. 1874). See Diana M. Jaskierny, “Armand Guillaumin, Landscape, Ivry-sur-Seine, ca. 1874,” technical entry in this catalogue, https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.621.2088.

7. The thickness and reflectance of the paint likely played a role in the limited visibility of the underdrawing in the infrared reflectogram (see Figure 9), captured at 2444 nanometers. Correspondence from John Twilley to Sophia Boosalis, January 14, 2026, NAMA conservation file, 2021.16.1.

8. Guillaumin preferred his paintings to remain unvarnished, as evidenced by the inscription “ne pas vernir” (do not varnish) on the verso of Moret-sur-Loing (1902; private collection). See the accompanying catalogue entry by Marcereau DeGalan.