Factories at Clichy

Instead of boating parties and riverside cafes, Van Gogh turned toward red roofs and chimneys pouring black smoke. In the summer of 1887 he painted the industrial edge of Paris, with a small couple standing in a field before it.

The story behind the painting

Van Gogh painted this oil on canvas in the summer of 1887. It shows smoking factory chimneys across the Seine, and even its title is debated. At the time Asnieres was still a village whose restaurants, guinguettes, boating and swimming drew Parisians, and Emile Bernard, whose parents owned a property there, introduced Van Gogh to it. Clichy, on the opposite bank, was booming with chemical works, soap factories and textile industry. Because of that contrast most authors reverse the old title, Factories at Asnieres seen from the Quai de Clichy, and the Saint Louis Art Museum shows it as Factories at Clichy.

What to look for

The canvas, about 53.7 by 72.7 cm, is divided into three horizontal bands. At the bottom lies a field painted with a pointillist technique. Behind it rise factories whose chimneys, emerging from red tile roofs, spit black smoke into a grey-blue sky. A couple stands at the centre of the field, separated from the factories by a continuous fence of stakes. The French article compares the composition to Van Gogh's own Coal Mine in the Borinage of 1879. The painting belongs to a series of three triptychs on the banks of the Seine: the Grande Jatte, Clichy and Asnieres.

Meaning and intent

Choosing a bleak industrial suburb set the picture apart from the more rural tradition of the first Impressionists, though it follows a line of painting going back to early industrialisation. Here Van Gogh briefly turned his back on the picturesque north bank, a place of popular pleasure painted by Monet, Renoir and Seurat, to look at the factories where a working class toiled at the margins of the city of light. In Paris he was interested in the lives of ordinary people in the new industrial outskirts, and the article reads this treatment as a pessimistic view of industrialisation and factory work.

Legacy

In 1894 the painting belonged to Pere Tanguy and was sold with his estate. It then passed through several galleries and a private owner before leaving France for England with Gustav Robinow in 1911, then Germany with Paul M. and Emily Robinow from 1914 to 1928, the Netherlands, and the United States with Wilhelm Weinberg from 1930 to 1957. M. Knoedler and Co. acquired it in 1957, and the Saint Louis Art Museum bought it from the gallery in 1959. It has hung in Missouri ever since.