View of the Seine, Paris

Painted in 1871 when Paris was barely recovering from the chaos of the Commune and the Prussian siege, this view of the Seine offers one of Guillaumin's earliest mature landscapes and a document of the city reasserting its normalcy after catastrophe. The Seine flowing through Paris was one of the great subjects of nineteenth-century French painting, from Corot's atmospheric upstream views to Manet's bridges and quais, and Guillaumin entered this tradition from a specific social angle: as someone who understood the river as a working environment, not a leisure resource. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston acquired this canvas as part of its French Impressionist holdings, and the work's 1871 date gives it particular documentary as well as artistic value. The composition looks downstream, taking in the city's skyline in the distance — a reminder that Paris itself, the destination of so much ambition, lay always just beyond the immediate subject of Guillaumin's early riverside paintings.

Oil on canvas with the controlled but increasingly responsive touch of Guillaumin's earliest mature phase. The palette is relatively muted by his later standards, with the green-grey Seine, pale sky, and grey-stone quais creating a tonal coherence that the later work would break open with saturated colour. The composition follows a classic river landscape structure — near bank, water, far bank — with the city providing a horizontal conclusion to the recession.