The Road Mender (Le Cantonnier)

Road menders and labourers occupied a significant place in Guillaumin's subject matter throughout his career, partly from personal solidarity — he worked as a labourer himself for years before the lottery win freed him — and partly from an Impressionist commitment to painting working life as it actually appeared. 'The Road Mender' of 1890 shows a cantonnier, the French term for the municipal worker responsible for maintaining rural roads, at his repetitive task. The subject had been treated by Van Gogh in his Provence letters and by Pissarro in his Pontoise period, and Guillaumin's contribution to this working-class iconography is less well known but equally sincere. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum holds this canvas as part of its French Impressionist holdings. By 1890 Guillaumin's palette had become fully saturated: the greens and ochres of the roadside verge push toward the limits of naturalism, anticipating the Fauve direction that younger painters would take fifteen years later.

Oil on canvas with vigorous, unblended strokes applied across the entire surface in the manner of Guillaumin's maturity. The road mender's figure is integrated into the landscape rather than isolated as a figure study, the orange-red of his clothing providing a warm accent against the greens of the verge. The road surface itself is painted with varying greys and ochres that record its texture and the quality of the midday light falling on it.