DONAT GUILLOT

(French, 19th century)

SHEPHERDESS IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE

Oil on Fruitwood Panel

6¼ x 12¾ Inches

Signed Lower Left, 'D. Guillot'

Displayed in a period and antique, carved giltwood and gesso frame.

Framed dimensions: 10½ H x 16¾ W x 1½ D inches

 

A delicately painted, cabinet-sized late 19th-century landscape showing a view of a young shepherdess standing beside a goat, and with her flock of sheep grazing beside a lush riverbank beneath light-suffused evening clouds. The artist has accomplished a serene and luminous landscape with exceptionally fine detail in all areas.

 

Donat Guillot was born in Meulan and studied with Emile-Charles Lambinet who had, himself, studied with Jean-Baptiste Corot and Horace Vernet. The influence of these earlier masters may clearly be seen in both the luminosity and the organic complexity of the trees and foliage in Guillot's own, elegant and classically-derived, landscapes.

 

Guillot made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Françaises of 1868 and subsequently established his reputation as a landscape painter and, particularly, as an animalier. Guillot's work was sought after in his lifetime and may now be found in prominent private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Clamecy, France, which retains three of his animalier landscapes, and also in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow which holds "A View of Courbevoie, a Suburb of Paris" from circa 1885.

 

Reference:

E. Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs, Jacques Busse, 1999 Nouvelle Édition, Gründ 1911, Vol. 6, page 579; Thieme-Becker Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zu Gegenwart, Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1992, Vol. 15, page 318; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Clamecy, Catalog of 1889, pages 9, 11 and 14; et al.