Pissarro and Monet: Industrialization and Impressionism

Camille Pissarro’s 1896 painting Morning, Overcast Day in Rouen portrays the center of the town of Rouen, France, on a thoroughly grey day. A cast iron bridge arches across the center of the painting, carrying a procession of pedestrians, a meek yellow bus, and horses. Underneath, the Seine river shimmers, conveying three steamships, one prominent in the foreground with a thick smokestack. This ship is unloading onto the visible quay of the riverbank from which the scene is painted. On the opposite bank stand dozens of buildings, densely packed, mostly two to four stories, all with chimneys. One brick-colored smokestack towers over the city, belching dark smoke into a bright sky composed of subtle shades of grey and white, where steam, fog, clouds, and smoke mix, reflecting in the river below.

Pissarro made this painting in the final years of his life. He had been practicing this impressionist style for multiple decades when he visited Rouen, as is revealed by his even brushstrokes and thick, textured paint. As an impressionist, he paid great attention to the light of the overcast day, carefully modulating the natural features with Monet-like brushwork in the river’s surface. No saturated colors attract specific attention; while the hues convey the scene modestly, subtle mixing of reds, greens, and blues into every subject brings a liveliness to the scene. The value range is grounded in small black industrial elements and the near-white sky, with little surface area in mid-tones. The result is a strikingly brilliant overcast effect, letting the industrious city shine. It spoke to me immediately.

The Boieldieu Bridge that Pissarro painted was completed the decade prior. His placement of the bridge as the centerpiece of the town immediately represents this new type of design and building, alongside the many chimneys and at least eight smokestacks (the patchwork style makes it difficult to discern) dotting the cityscape, as industrial progress to live with and perhaps celebrate. The city bustles with pedestrians trodding across the bridge and port workers attending to the ship. The scene readily animates in viewers’ minds, preserving a moment in time to seemingly represent the city forever.

In the next room at the Metropolitan Museum hangs Claude Monet’s 1891 painting The Four Trees (~82cm square). It was painted geographically between Rouen and Paris, at Giverny, and portrays a natural landscape seen from the river Epte, jutting off the Seine. Four trees stand on a riverbank over foliage, reflected in the water and rising out of the frame. In the background, a diagonal stand of trees recedes into the center, painted with pastel shades which nearly fluoresce in person. His iconic brushwork renders no features in high resolution, but gestures the shapes in a flat layer of paint. Monet pairs and mixes far more saturated hues to capture a fleeting moment, at perhaps dawn, of intense lighting.

Both paintings came decades into their painters’ careers, and are members of series each artist made in their respective settings spanning dramatically different lighting and weather. Pissarro made a rendition of the same bridge at sunset which features a more similarly sun-tinged amber palette to this Monet. But the lighting conditions of each of these paintings tell a story of their artists and the industrializing world they painted in.

The artists, living through the accelerating Industrial Revolution, lived with and shared a visual interest in that industrialization. In decades prior, Monet made famous paintings of train stations in Paris like the Gare Saint-Lazare which used novel iron building techniques, and both artists likely relied on trains to places like Rouen to make these paintings. His move out to Giverny was in response to the bustling of Paris.

Both paintings share obvious compositional features, such as being dominated in area by sky, grounded in river water, and focusing primarily on the opposite river bank, with diagonal rows of similar subjects receding into the background. Crucially, besides the sky and river, everything in the scene of Rouen is human-built. There are no plants of any variety, the horses are laboring guests of humans, and the people are reduced to small smudges of black, reminiscent of Monet’s earlier Boulevard des Capucines. The smoke from chimneys and ships literally clouds the skies. Monet’s scene of a still moment, painted from a boat, feels pristine and undisturbed in comparison, with seemingly no human intervention.

Yet for Monet’s painting, wall text reveals a clear connection to industrialization: “Completion of the series was temporarily threatened when the village of Limetz, across the Epte from Giverny, decided to sell the trees at auction. Monet paid a local lumber merchant to ensure that the trees remained standing until he finished his work.” While these trees would have met a forgotten fate as industrial material or energy, Monet’s rendering dedicates them to historical memory first, standing starkly. Whether the trees’ spacing/placement was natural or human, the composition of the four strong, parallel trunks rising into the sky with no end in frame evokes that of industrial infrastructure like smokestacks. A similar painting could be made along the river of Providence, Rhode Island, where today, Manchester Street Generating Station’s three smokestacks tower similarly in parallel along a riverbank.

Impressionism and industrialization had a reciprocal relationship. Artists abandoned the dogmatic re-painting of famous stories and motifs to visit and examine their surroundings, paying close attention to lighting and air. Both Monet and Pissarro were drawn to the new monuments of the industrializing world, of iron structures and belching smokestacks. Their styles responded in turn, splitting light and color in new ways to reveal beauty in the natural and newly built. Though Four Trees and Overcast Day seem at first to reveal opposing visions and moments in an industrializing world, they are both of and revealing it.