Sunset at La Frette

Charles Guilloux worked at the Bibliothèque nationale, the mammoth national library in Paris. As an artist he was self-taught and quite productive, exhibiting widely. Like many of his fellow artists, he picked up on traits of Japanese prints: high vantage points, strong diagonals, simplified forms, and swaths of pure color. Though now subsumed into the fabric of metropolitan Paris, La Frette was a village on the north bank of the Seine. In Guilloux’s sunset view, trees reflected on the glassy water suggest the stillness of this summer evening.