By the late 19th century, factories and mass production were part of almost every major North American and European city. The artistic reaction to these vast manufacturing structures ranged from indifference and aesthetic contempt to fascination or even exaltation, depending on the painter’s perspective.
Beyond the plight of the factory worker, which would later provide subject matter for many socially-inclined realist artists, there was the factory itself. Earlier factories were often more appealing in appearance, built in the same manner as large schools or hospitals, with brick facades and colored roofs. A factory’s frequent placement next to a canal or river allowed easy access for shipping and receiving by boat—or for dumping waste into the water—yet it also added to a heightened visual effect.
Impressionistic Factories
American Impressionists like Willard Leroy Metcalf viewed factories and big textile mills as ugly invasions that were ruining New England, and Metcalf and various colleagues made a point of painting the vanishing beauty of the non-industrial landscape instead. The French Impressionists, however, seemed to take the presence of factories more in stride and incorporated them into several works, amid backdrops as softly-lit and lovely as any of their other scenes.
French Impressionist Alfred Sisley’s The Factory at Sèvres was painted around 1879, after Sisley moved to the area. Sèvres, located due southwest of Paris, has been famed for its porcelain factory for centuries and employed the talents of many major artists in the production of its wares. Though Sisley was not working at the factory itself, he painted a fine depiction of it with a bright, thickly-stroked style perfect for the late spring setting.
Post-Impressionist and Pointillist Factories
Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau also found inspiration in factories. Though Van Gogh and Gauguin were less idealized in their depictions. Rousseau added his uniquely dreamlike touch to scenes like The Chair Factory from 1897. In the painting, clouds float beyond the red-capped factory, which appears to be closed for a Sunday respite. Everything is clean and tidy but not sterile, as people stroll by and a man fishes in the nearby river. The factory seems to be a welcome part of the town, not menacing but simply where chairs are made or where one goes to earn a decent wage.
In another curiously dreamy factory vision, Belgian artist Georges Lemmen used Pointillist techniques to paint the coolly blue-hued 1892-94 Factories on the Thames. Lemmen was a member of the artistic group known as Les XX, and upon seeing the work of another Georges and XX member (Georges Seurat), he began experimenting with and mastering Pointillism himself.
Incense of a New Church
While the Futurists worshiped the power of the machine, the Vorticists claimed to want to celebrate the machine age even further with art full of “factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works.” And then there were the Precisionists, American artists working approximately between World Wars I and II whose focus was on the sharp, clean lines of the era's booming industrialism. Unlike the melancholy of Edward Hopper’s world, Precisionist paintings were neutral and of course precise, exalting cities of industry without any particular emotional concern for anyone toiling within them.
Niles Spencer’s 1950 The Watch Factory is an excellent example of late Precisionist art: angular, un-peopled, and as tightly-ordered as a timepiece. Pennsylvania-born Charles Demuth was a major Precisionist painter, and his 1921 Incense of a New Church shows a more imposing factory scene. Stiffly corkscrewing spirals of smoke rise up toward black towers, with subtext from the title suggesting that capitalism is America’s true religion and that the country’s huge factories were once its real temples of worship.
Sources
- American Salons – Robert M. Crunden (Oxford University Press, 1993)
- Precisionism and a Few of Its Friends – The New York Times
- Niles Spencer, The Watch Factory – Butler Institute of American Art
- Museum of Modern Art – Vorticism
