Paul
GUIGOU

Destined for a career as a notary, Paul Guigou, originally from the Vaucluse, managed to make his family admit that another path was calling him. Encouraged by Emile Loubon, he participated almost every year in the exhibition of the Regional Artistic Society and made his first contacts with his contemporaries whose work particularly interested him: Corot, Troyon, Adolphe Monticelli or Félix Ziem.

He began to travel regularly to Paris before settling there. He met many famous artists at the Café Guerbois. Paul Guigou is known as the painter of the banks of the Durance. Many art critics saw in his approach to landscape a great modernity, and even considered him a precursor of impressionism. For his friend Frédéric Mistral: "No one better than him was able to render the luminous charm of our beautiful region, the harsh poetry of its rocky and powdery soil. He does not occupy in the world of the arts the place to which he has the right. But it will come".

This artist probably owes the confidentiality of his work to the rarity of his production, since he died at the age of 37. However, the quality of his work has long since led several researchers as well as a few knowledgeable amateurs to take an interest in the painter. Several of Paul Guigou's works have found their way into prestigious public and private collections (in France and abroad), the most emblematic of which is La Lavandière, now in the Musée d'Orsay, donated to the Louvre by the dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1912.