Portrait of a Young Woman

From the middle of May to the middle of June 1886, the Impressionists held their eighth group show at 1 rue Laffitte in Paris. It turned out to be the last, and the room everyone argued about was Seurat's, with his large Sunday on the island of La Grande Jatte. Guillaumin helped organise the exhibition and hung a run of portraits there, this young woman among them. Reviewing the show, the critic Jean Ajalbert wrote that the painter's vigour was sometimes pushed as far as brutality. He meant handling like this: pink, orange and green laid on thickly and left to blend in the visitor's eye a few steps back. Her name has not survived. The face matches a canvas Guillaumin called The Model, painted the year before, so she seems to have sat for him more than once. Theo van Gogh bought the portrait in Paris within two years of that show, while Vincent was living with him.