Rocher à la pointe de la Baumette

The 'pointe de la Baumette' is a rocky promontory near Crozant where the Creuse and Sédelle rivers meet, its distinctive granite formation providing one of the area's most dramatic natural viewpoints. Guillaumin painted this specific rock face in 1893 at a period of maximum engagement with the Crozant landscape, and the canvas, now at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, represents the geological subject at its most reduced and powerful — a close view of an ancient rock formation treated almost as pure form and colour without the mediating narrative of human structures or figures. The Wallraf-Richartz, one of the great German collections of French painting from the medieval through the modern, holds this alongside the Agay coastal canvas also in this batch, demonstrating the museum's interest in Guillaumin's geographic range.

Oil on canvas with Guillaumin's rock-painting technique applied to a close-focus geological subject. The granite face is built from overlapping strokes in warm ochre, grey-brown, and the distinctive warm-pink of weathered Creuse stone, with cooler tones in the shadows and crevices. The composition is unusually spare — rock, perhaps water and sky in marginal passages — concentrating the pictorial energy on the geological subject itself.