The Factory at Asnières

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The Factory at Asnières: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Factory at Asnières

Keywords: Factory, Asnières

Work Overview: The Factory at Asnières
Summer, 1887
The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, PA

Van Gogh was identified as one of the first, with other Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters, to depict industrial landscapes such as The Factory at Asnières (F318) Armand Guillaumin's Sunset at Ivry made in 1873 is another example.

As industrialization spread across the Parisian countryside, writers spoke out and artists painted a phenomenon called by some "banlieue" or "vague terrain". Victor Hugo wrote a passage added to the 1861 edition of Les Miserables:

“To wander in a kind of reverie, to take a stroll as they call it, is a good way for a philosopher to spend his time: particularly in that kind of bastard countryside, somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, which surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris. To observe the banlieue is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of passions, the end of the murmur or things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankinds -- all this holds an extraordinary interest. And, thus, in these unattractive places, forever marked by the passer-by with the epithet sad, the promenades, apparently aimless, of the dreamer.[21]

To van Gogh, industrialization meant loss of a revered lifestyle, the simple life of the peasant. Paul van der Griip, author of Art and Exoticism: An Anthropology of the Yearning for Authenticity, wrote of van Gogh's intention to portray his message of concern, "In his representations of the city he mainly paid attention to the expanding outskirts which swallowed up the countryside, whereby city and country life were often juxtaposed, sometimes in the form of trains for factories blotting the countryside."[22] Van Gogh's painting Outskirts of Paris (F264) illustrates the looming encroachment of factories to the countryside.

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