View of the Oissel Cotton Mill, near Rouen

View of the Oissel Cotton Mill, near Rouen at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, painted in 1898, is among the most direct of Pissarro's engagements with industrial modernity in his urban series phase. He had been painting Rouen — its cathedral, its quays, its bridges — since the 1880s, but this canvas takes as its specific subject the cotton mill at Oissel, a few kilometers up the Seine, with its chimneys and factory buildings defining the river horizon as surely as any medieval tower. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which holds one of Canada's major collections of European and world art, acquired this industrial landscape as part of its French Impressionist holdings. The choice of an industrial factory as a landscape subject was deliberate and political: Pissarro's anarchist politics made him attentive to the transformation of the Norman countryside he had known since the 1860s by the forces of industrial capitalism, and his willingness to paint factories with the same Impressionist vocabulary he applied to cathedrals and orchards was a statement about the equal visual interest of all aspects of contemporary life.

The industrial buildings are rendered with Pissarro's characteristic broken stroke, their chimneys and rooflines softened by atmospheric haze and reflection in the river. The palette balances warm ochre factory walls against cool grey-blue water and sky. The composition uses the river surface as a reflective mirror that integrates the industrial forms with the landscape.