Alexandre Marie Guillemin - The Little Spinner

Alexandre Marie GUILLEMIN Paris, 1817 - Bois-le-Roi, 1880 32 x 25.5 cm (46 x 39 cm with the frame) Oil on panel Signed and dated at left in the middle  “A. Guillemin / 1854 » Wax stamp on the back Probably exhibited at the Salon of 1855, n°3255, "La petit fileuse" Student of Gros, Alexandre Guillemin was one of those Parisian academic painters who went as far as the houses of Brittany to represent the peasants and peasant women in the years 1850 to 1870. These “intimate painters” were named Leleux (Armand and Adolphe), Jules Trayer and Henri Royer. It is the birth of naturalist painting but still attached to Flemish painting which has just influenced romantic painting. The very beautiful exhibition "Requirements for realism in French painting between 1830 and 1870" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Chartres in 1983 speak in particular of "the first reception of the paintings exhibited at the Salon of 1850-51 and grouped together by historians of the art under the label "realist", "official realism of the Second Empire" and "representations of peasants between 1852 and 1870". Alexandre Guillemin received a third class medal at the 1841 Salon and a second class medal in 1845. At the Salon des Beaux-Arts at the Universal Exhibition held at the Grand Palais on May 15, 1855, he exhibited several small paintings including "La little spinner" which is probably our painting. The subject is a young peasant girl who has stopped spinning, lost in her contemplation of the Virgin Mary who figures in a modest picture hanging on the wall in front of her. The rapprochement is certainly voluntary between the state of poverty of the two characters but also the grace, the innocence and the beauty that can emerge from the little spinner just like from the Virgin Mary! The delicacy of the craftsmanship is remarkable with the concern for rendering the young girl's complexion, the multiple details as well as the rendering of the different materials (fabric, paper, wood, copper and stone). As "The Artist" noted in 1845, "M. Alexandre Guillemin, who was once content to paint Bretons in cabaret or more or less picturesque interior scenes, wanted to rise to serious painting" and in these canvases, "there is something more to it: feeling". His works are kept in many museums in France (Meaux, Brest, Le Havre, Toulon) and abroad (Walters Art museum in Baltimore, United States, Fine Arts Museum in Montreal).