Factories at Clichy

Factories at Clichy, painted in 1887 during Van Gogh's Paris period and now held at the Saint Louis Art Museum, extends his lifelong interest in labour to the industrial landscape of the Parisian suburbs — a subject that the Impressionists had largely avoided in favour of leisure and domestic subjects. Clichy was a working-class industrial commune northwest of Montmartre, with factories, gas works, and workshops that Van Gogh explored with the same sympathy he had brought to Belgian coal mines and Dutch weavers' cottages. The subject had been established as legitimate by Zola's industrial novels, which Van Gogh had read obsessively, and by the occasional factory scenes of painters like Monet (his factory chimneys at Argenteuil) and Sisley. Van Gogh's treatment is less atmospheric than Monet's and more direct in its insistence on the factory as a subject of equal dignity to the garden or the haystacks.

Factory subjects require Van Gogh to develop a new brushwork language for industrial architecture—the hard geometries of chimneys and factory walls rendered with more angular, structural marks than his organic landscapes. The palette for an industrial scene would be more subdued than his flower paintings, dominated by greys, ochres, and the orange-brown of brick. Smoke and sky provide atmospheric passages that contrast with the rigid factory forms below.