Alexandre Marie GUILLEMIN - The little spinner

Alexandre Marie GUILLEMIN
Paris, 1817 - Bois-le-Roi, 1880
32 x 25,5 cm (46 x 39 cm with the frame)
Oil on panel
Signed and dated on the left "A. Guillemin / 1854 ".
Wax stamp on the back
Probably exhibited at the 1855 Salon, n°3255, "La petit fileuse" (The little spinner)
A student of Gros, Alexandre Guillemin was one of those Parisian academic painters who went into the homes of Brittany to depict peasants and peasant women in the 1850s to 1870s. The names of these "intimate painters" are Leleux (Armand and Adolphe), Jules Trayer and Henri Royer. It was the birth of naturalist painting but still attached to Flemish painting which had just influenced romantic painting. The very beautiful exhibition "Requirements of realism in French painting between 1830 and 1870" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Chartres in 1983 spoke in particular of "the first reception of the paintings exhibited at the Salon of 1850-51 and grouped together by art historians under the label "realist", of the "official realism of the Second Empire" and of "representations of peasants between 1852 and 1870".
Alexandre Guillemin received a third class medal at the 1841 Salon and a second class medal in 1845. At the Salon des Beaux-Arts of the Universal Exhibition held at the Grand Palais on May 15, 1855, he exhibited several small paintings, including "La petite fileuse" which is probably our painting.
The subject is a young peasant woman who has stopped spinning, lost in her contemplation of the Virgin Mary who appears on a modest image hanging on the wall in front of her. The comparison is certainly voluntary between the state of poverty of the two characters but also the grace, innocence and beauty that can emerge from the little spinner as well as the Virgin Mary! The finesse of the workmanship is remarkable with the care taken to render the skin tone of the young girl, the multiple details as well as the rendering of the different materials (fabric, paper, wood, copper and stone). As noted in "L'artiste" in 1845, "M. Alexandre Guillemin, who used to be content with painting Bretons in cabarets or more or less picturesque interior scenes, wants to elevate himself to serious painting" and in these canvases, "one finds something more: feeling".
His works are kept in many museums in France (Meaux, Brest, Le Havre, Toulon) and abroad (Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA, Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal).

Ref: X8Z6C7ZOBD