Arman Guillaumin was one of the early Impressionists who established the program of this important movement in the last third of the 19th century. At the private and independent Académie Suisse he met Cézanne and Pissarro, with whom he was rejected by the official Salon in 1863. The artists then exhibited in the Salon des Refusés, proclaimed by Napoléon III after the official jury had been criticized for its decisions. Manet presented his famous "Breakfast in the Country" there (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and innovations outside of the academic art scene thus began. In the early 1870s, he painted with Pissarro and Cézanne in Pointoise and Auvers at the house of the patron Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet. The first exhibition, organized in 1874 by the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs at the premises of the photographer Nadar in Paris, was of greatest importance: based on Monet's painting "Impression, soleil levant", the art critic Léon Leroy coined the term Impressionism, however, initially with a disrespectful intention. Guillaumin subsequently took part in six of the eight exhibitions organized up until 1886, and he also showed works at the Salon des Indépendants, the Belgian Libre esthétique and later at the Salon d'Automne. Guillaumin was well connected in the Parisian avant-gard circle and also exerted his influence on the generation of Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat and Signac, who were enthusiastic about his unusually colorful paintings. Signac acquired some of his paintings, as did Gauguin. Vincent van Gogh, with whom he had been acquainted since 1887, recommended his works to his brother Theo, who worked for the art dealer Goupil & Cie; some from his private collection found their way into the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Guillaumin assisted the gallery owner Paul Durand-Ruel in preparing the major Impressionist show in New York in 1886, for which 42 cases containing 300 works were shipped across the ocean. Guillaumin's views of Damietta were presented alongside Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro in one of the halls with works by Signac and Seurat. That year saw the last Impressionist exhibitions, in which Guillaumin's paintings, this time next to Gauguin's, stood out for their coloring. The often purplish-violet coloring and the lively texture appear to the critics as a kaleidoscope or fireworks. The motifs found in the villages and landscapes of the countryside around Paris, among them Damiette, Ivry-sur-Sein or Charenton, offered an opportunity to liberate color and texture. In the 1890s, alongside Durand-Ruel, he was represented by the most prestigious Parisian galleries, including Goupil, Bernheim-Jeune and Druet, through which his works attracted the attention of important collectors in Europe, the United States and Russia, including Georges Viau, Paul Gachet or Sergei Shtshukin. [KT]