Bord de Seine à Charenton

The banks of the Seine at Charenton in 1885 represent Guillaumin returning to a subject he had explored in his earliest career — the stretch of river at Charenton-le-Pont where the Marne meets the Seine, southeast of Paris, was among his most frequented early painting sites. By 1885 the financial pressure of his dual life as artist and municipal worker was still active, but his technique had developed substantially over the fifteen years since his earliest Charenton views. This canvas, held in the Charles-André Colonna-Walewski collection, represents a private acquisition that kept the work outside the major institutional collections. The Charenton subject in 1885 shows the fully developed middle-period Guillaumin: the colour more saturated than the 1870s, the brushwork broader, the approach to light and atmosphere more assured. The riverbank remained a constant in his work precisely because it offered the combination of water, vegetation, and the low human structures of the working river environment.

Oil on canvas with the medium-period handling of Guillaumin's mid-1880s style — broader strokes than the early work, more saturated colour, but not yet the full liberation of the post-lottery late phase. The Marne-Seine confluence area provided a characteristic combination of wide water surface, flat banks, and the distant Parisian horizon, and Guillaumin handles these elements with practiced economy. Greens and ochres dominate the vegetation, blue-greys the water.