View of the Seine, Paris 1871

Armand Guillaumin’s *View of the Seine, Paris* is an oil painting, a medium that has its own story to tell. Pigments ground with oil were the stuff of the industrial revolution. By the late 1800s, paint was available in tubes, making it easy to move out of the studio and paint cityscapes like this one. Guillaumin captures a moment of the everyday. We see figures strolling along the riverbank, framed by trees against a backdrop of Parisian architecture. The brushwork is loose, almost gestural, with a focus on capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. But don’t be fooled by the casual impression. The image is built up through layers of paint and the careful combination of colors. There’s a material intelligence at play here, a process of art making that’s thoroughly grounded in a specific time and place. It shows that traditional techniques of landscape painting could adapt to new realities, reflecting modern life. It reminds us that artistic vision is always entangled with the materials at hand, and the social world that makes them available.