Soleil couchant à Ivry

Sunset at Ivry, painted in 1873 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, is among Guillaumin's most celebrated early works, regularly reproduced as an example of his proto-Fauve approach to industrial landscape. Ivry-sur-Seine, southeast of Paris, was one of the most heavily industrialised communes in the Paris metropolitan area: factory chimneys, gas works, and the freight yards of the Vincennes railway dominated the skyline. The sunset over this industrial scene gave Guillaumin the chromatic opportunity he needed — the warm oranges and reds of the dying light set against the dark silhouettes of chimneys and factory buildings, the Seine running below reflecting the burning sky. The picture's colour is so saturated and the industrial theme so unromantic that it sits as a kind of prophetic document, anticipating aspects of Fauvism and even Expressionism decades before either movement found its name. The Orsay holds it as a key work in the pre-history of twentieth-century colour.

Oil on canvas with an intensity of chromatic saturation unusual for French painting of 1873. Guillaumin uses complementary contrast at near-maximum intensity — the orange-vermilion sky against the blue-grey shadows of the factory buildings and river — with minimal intermediate mixing that gives the picture its characteristic raw power. The brushwork is direct and loaded, with the sky in particular built from broad strokes that seem to vibrate against the dark industrial silhouettes.