FRANÇOIS GUIGUET (1860 - 1937)

 
 
A FEMALE LIFE STUDY
 
 
Bears the artist's estate stamp l.r.
Pencil with red & white chalks
36 x 26 cm
 
 
PROVENANCE
By descent to Natale F. Guiguet, Corbelin
 
 
 
 
 
 
Guiguet was born into a large family in Corbelin, a small town in the Isère in southeast France. By chance, a doctor saw some of the teenage François’ drawings, and recommended that his parents show these to François-Auguste Ravier, a painter who lived in the nearby village of Morestel. Ravier was so impressed that he agreed to teach Guiguet for several years, in preparation for the young man entering the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. 
 
 
At Ravier’s recommendation, Guiguet was enrolled in the class of Michel Dumas, a sometime student of Ingres, who instilled in him the principles and artistic style of the Classical tradition. With the support of Édouard Aynard, director of the museum commission, and Antonin Dubost, the Deputy from Isère, Guiguet went to Paris to complete his studies at the École des Beaux-arts, where he worked in the studios of Alexandre Cabanel, the highly-respected painter who was among the most successful artists of the Second Empire. 
 
 
During his time in Paris, Guiguet befriended the great muralist Puvis de Chavannes, himself the leading advocate of classical art in France at the time, and Félix Thiollier, a collector, writer and amateur photographer. The young François was also friends with such artists as Degas, Gauguin, Denis and Harpignies, and in 1894 participated in the seventh Exposition des Peintres Impressionnistes et Symbolistes at the Parisian gallery Le Barc de Boutteville, alongside Gauguin and the artists of the Nabis group. 
 
 
His Salon debut was in 1885, and thereafter he exhibited in such diverse locations as Britain, the U.S.A., Germany and even the island of Réunion. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1910, and returned to Corbelin at the outbreak of war, where he would remain to the end of his life. Several years after his death, his nephew bequeathed a collection of his uncle’s paintings, watercolours and more than three and a half thousand drawings to Corbelin, where a museum was established many years later (in 1989) but was closed in 2011.