Factories at Clichy

Factories at Clichy (1887), at the Saint Louis Art Museum, shows Van Gogh turning to the industrial outskirts of Paris—a subject that would have seemed unpromising to conventional landscape painters but that connected directly to his lifelong sympathy with labour and the working class. Clichy, to the northwest of Montmartre, was an area of factories, workshops, and working-class habitation that he explored on painting trips during his Paris years. The industrial subject recalls his earlier fascination with Belgian coal mines and his insistence that the modern world of work deserved artistic attention as much as any pastoral scene.

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.