Sunset at Ivry

In 1872 Guillaumin took a post with the state bridges and roads service. Pissarro wrote that year that his friend painted through the day and then went out to work on his diggings at night, sometimes three nights a week. What lay in front of him was Ivry-sur-Seine, a commune just upstream of Paris where factories were going up along the water, and in 1873 he painted it at dusk, with the chimneys smoking into an orange sky. The following spring the canvas hung in the first Impressionist exhibition, in the photographer Nadar's old studio on the boulevard des Capucines, as number 66. It belonged to Doctor Paul Gachet of Auvers-sur-Oise, the physician van Gogh would paint in 1890, and Gachet's son handed it to the French state in 1951, along with the rest of what his father had collected.