Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927) was one of the founding members of French Impressionism, a close friend and painting companion of both Cézanne and Pissarro, and a painter whose fierce chromatic independence set him apart from every other member of his circle. For much of his career he balanced his art against grueling government work — at times digging ditches three nights a week to pay the bills — painting in whatever daylight he could find. When he won 100,000 francs in a city lottery in 1891 he finally abandoned the day job and devoted himself entirely to painting, producing landscapes of Paris, the Creuse valley, and the Mediterranean coast in colors so bold that the critic Félix Fénéon called him "a furious colourist" — a decade before Fauvism made that a compliment. Vincent van Gogh admired him deeply, and Guillaumin outlived every other original Impressionist, dying in 1927 as the last survivor of the movement he helped found.
