Lot 2177 Dα

This imposing view of Morsalines was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882, the year in which Antoine Guillemet was also a member of the Salon jury (and helped Paul Cézanne to exhibit there). Guillemet learned landscape painting from Jean-Baptiste Corot, whom he met in 1861, and by the early 1880s he was one of the most well-established landscape painters in France, as evidenced not only by his appointment as a member of the Salon jury but also by his admission to the Legion of Honour (1880). The artist was a close friend of the Impressionists and their advocates, especially Émile Zola, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet. The latter immortalised Guillemet together with Berthe Morisot and the violinist Fanny Claus in his famous painting Le Balcon (cf. fig. 1; Paris, Musée d'Orsay).
Morsalines is located in Normandy, in the Manche département on the Contentin peninsula on the English Channel. Antoine Guillemet painted the small fishing village, as well as the neighbouring Saint-Vaast-La-Hougue, many times. He showed numerous landscapes depicting these places at the Paris Salon, especially in the 1880s and 90s (e.g. 1881, 1882,1886, 1887, 1890, 1893, 1895, 1900).