Charles Victor Guilloux 

Biography of Charles Victor Guilloux  ( 1866-1946 )

A self-taught artist, Charles Guilloux learned by observing nature. He lingered on the effects of light, the reflections of water and the silhouettes of trees that evoked a captivating natural architecture.

A first scientific training and a job at the National Library awakened Guilloux's curiosity and he studied the new treatises on color. He was obviously sensitive to the research of Seurat and Signac on divisionism and pointillism. He concentrated more on lines and exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in 1892. The eight paintings he exhibited were immediately successful and he sold all his pieces. 

The art critic Roger Marx wrote glowing reviews of Guilloux, emphasizing his contribution to the emerging Symbolism and recognizing that he was more "concerned with poetry than with exact reality".
Between 1890 and 1895, the artist used very synthetic lines and an essentially smooth material to transcribe his feelings as an artist in front of the landscape. Nature reveals itself both marvelous and dramatic under his brushes.

He does not work on the motif, like the impressionists, but from memory, seeking to find the feelings experienced during his walks in nature. 

From 1892, Charles Guilloux exhibited at all the Impressionist and Symbolist Painters' Exhibitions at the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery, rue Le Peletier in Paris, alongside Signac, Anquetin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and the Nabis. He also exhibited in Belgium in Antwerp in 1893 and in Brussels in 1895, then at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1905.

On his preparatory drawings made on the ground, he notes the combinations of colors and the associated feeling that allows him to find his sensations in the studio: "purple-golden yellow-violet Magnificent" or "dark orange-outremer Pain, mourning". Among all the combinations, there is one that dominates his work "yellow-purple-black" that we find in his twilight paintings.

Charles Guilloux mainly painted landscapes around Paris, most often with bodies of water that reflect a nature tamed by man but from which he is almost always absent.