Mountainous landscape

Guillaumin's mountainous landscape, now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, reflects the artist's growing interest from the early 1890s in the more dramatic terrain of the Massif Central and the Auvergne. Having spent most of his career painting the flat river valleys of the Ile-de-France and the gentler hills of the Creuse, his late-career encounter with genuine mountain scenery pushed his already bold palette toward even greater chromatic intensity. The volcanic peaks of Auvergne — particularly the Puy de Dôme chain — gave him forms of a grandeur quite unlike anything in his earlier work, and the 1895 period saw him repeatedly testing himself against these more challenging subjects. The Bavarian State Painting Collections acquired the canvas during the period when German institutions were actively building their Impressionist holdings, seeing French Impressionism as a key chapter in the broader European history of modern painting.

Oil on canvas with Guillaumin's characteristic loaded brushwork responding to the scale and drama of mountain forms. The handling is more varied than in his river landscapes, using larger, more decisive strokes for the mountain masses and finer marks for atmospheric distance. The palette exploits the full range of his colour vocabulary, with warm foreground browns and oranges receding into cool blue-purples in the distant peaks.