Factory at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône

In 1872 Pissarro brought his family back to Pontoise, a market town on the Oise north-west of Paris. On the opposite bank, at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, a factory had just gone up beside the river, distilling alcohol from sugar beet grown in the surrounding fields. In 1873 he painted it four times. Here the view runs straight across the Oise, with the water filling the bottom of the canvas, the red-roofed sheds strung along the far bank and smoke from three chimneys drifting into a sky piled with cloud. Pissarro was unusual among the Impressionists in taking industrial buildings as a subject at all. The art historian Richard Brettell pointed out that these factory views are the only paintings to survive from Pissarro's work of the 1860s and 1870s without a humanised foreground.