Mill of Pont Maupuit

Jean Baptiste Armand Guillaumin · c. 1900

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

63.5 × 80 cm (25 × 31 1/2 in.); Framed: 98.8 × 114.7 × 8 cm (38 7/8 × 45 1/8 × 3 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Mill of Pont Maupuit is a quietly powerful landscape that showcases Guillaumin's gift for capturing rural France with both intimacy and luminous colour. Armand Guillaumin was a central figure in the Impressionist circle — a close friend of Cézanne and Pissarro who exhibited in the first Impressionist show of 1874 — yet he remains one of the movement's more underappreciated voices. Where many of his peers favoured muted harmonies, Guillaumin pushed toward bolder, more saturated tones, giving his landscapes an expressive energy that anticipates the Post-Impressionists who followed. By 1900, freed from decades of day-job constraints, he was painting with the full confidence of a mature artist at ease in the countryside. One well-documented turning point in his life came in 1891, when Guillaumin won 100,000 francs in the French lottery — a windfall that allowed him to leave his job with the Paris municipal authority and devote himself entirely to painting. This hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully renders the textured brushwork, atmospheric depth, and characteristic warmth of the Art Institute of Chicago's original, giving the work a physical presence that no print can replicate.