Farmyard, A Pair Of Oil Paintings On Panel Signed By Guilleminet

A pair of oil paintings on panel depicting farmyard animals, signed by Claude-Marie Guilleminet, a 19th-century French painter who specialized in animal genre scenes and was particularly renowned as the leading expert and painter of farmyards and chicken coops.

The two paintings offered here are particularly representative of Guilleminet’s work and craftsmanship, as he employs a classic technique of the 19th-century “petits maîtres”: the penumbra effect.
The interior of the barn is bathed in earthy, dark tones, which help highlight the light on the birds’ plumage. The depiction of the white hen in the foreground of each panel serves as a major focal point of light, immediately drawing the viewer’s eye.

On the first panel, a pair of mallards has joined the hens. The mallard, with its beak wide open, lends an almost perceptible sense of sound to the painting.
The second panel focuses on the hierarchical structure of the chicken coop. We see a white hen drinking from a glazed terracotta bowl in the foreground, watched over by a haughty rooster and his harem of red and black hens.
Here, Guilleminet employs a classic technique of the 19th-century “petits maîtres”: the use of half-light.
The interior of the barn is bathed in earthy, dark tones, which helps highlight the light on the birds’ plumage. The depiction of the white hen in the foreground of each panel serves as a major focal point of light, immediately drawing the viewer’s eye.
Guilleminet’s magnificent craftsmanship is evident in the smallest details: the rendering of textures, the silky, glossy appearance of the feathers under the roosters’ necks, the yellow down of the tiny chicks, rendered with great delicacy, and the straw setting— the overturned wicker basket, and the grain on the ground—all reinforce the naturalism of the scene, typical of the Barbizon School movement.

19th-century work