Industrial Suburb by Georges Seurat

Like Signac and Luce, Seurat was drawn to and moved by the laboring classes factories, the shabby industrial suburbs of Paris, and the squalid conditions of workers' lives. What he may have thought of all this never appears explicitly in his work. As in all other connections, he is reticent in exhibiting strong feelings. This restraint is all the more effective in his treatments of workers and peasants - the objectivity he brings to bear is much more valuable than any amount of emotional indignation or theoretical condemnation.

This is an unforgettable picture of an industrial suburb with its angular, ugly buildings. The many verticals are dominated by the single smokestack in the distance. The flat foreground with its poor, stunted vegetation implies the chemical pollution of the atmosphere.

Seurat places the viewer in the heart of the no man's land that rose around big cities in the last century. It is a man-made desolation, malodorous and unhealthy. The artist has skillfully extracted a harsh poetic quality from squalor.