Factory Girls

By the late 1890s Breitner was a celebrated painter in Amsterdam, established enough to live on comfortable commissions. Instead he kept painting the people he had drawn as a young, unknown man, the servant girls, labourers and factory hands of a city that was industrialising fast. This canvas from around 1898 shows a group of girls from the factory, ordinary working women caught without pose or flattery. He stayed loyal to that subject his whole career. He painted them in the same loose, dark, grey-toned manner he used for the wet streets around them.