The Little Factory

This 1868 Strasbourg painting of a small factory — an unusual industrial subject for the Impressionist movement at an early date — documents Pissarro's engagement with the working landscape of the Oise valley near Pontoise, where factories, mills, and farms coexisted in the suburban countryside around Paris. Pissarro, more than any other Impressionist, was interested in labour, peasant life, and the rural economy as subjects. His anarchist political convictions informed this attention to the productive landscape rather than merely its scenic beauty. This early factory subject anticipates later industrial-rural landscapes by Sisley and Monet's Argenteuil factory paintings.

The early Pissarro style is visible here — firmer, more tonal than his later work, with the Barbizon influence of Corot and Millet still evident. The factory building is rendered solidly against the sky. Trees and foreground are painted in the structured, textured manner of his pre-fully-Impressionist decade.