Factories in Rouen
But, it is not nearly as confusing to his critics as his clear glorification of factories in cities two decades later. By the 1890s, when Pissarro painted his next series of industrial scenes, his political beliefs had become cemented. Christopher Lloyd comments in Camille Pissarro:
Pissarro's politics [were] fairly well defined. His friendships, his letters, his financial contributions, his affiliations, his reading, and his anarchist prints all reveal an interest in contemporary politics. It is likely that his political opinions hardened during the 1880s and it is certain that by the 1890s Pissarro was a philosophical, or intellectual anarchist (Lloyd 135).
It was then, after “his political opinions hardened,” after he had confirmed in his mind the validity of the anarchist message, that he paradoxically seemed to fall in love with the urban and the industrial, at least judging from his paintings of Rouen and its factories in 1896. In these works, Pissarro like never before contradicts his anarchist beliefs by placing the factories in the urban scenery of Rouen, thus glorifying not only industry, but also urbanity. Christopher Lloyd remarks that “Cities...were seen by anarchists as the perpetrators of society's evils. They were places where people were exploited and ultimately destroyed by their environment" (Lloyd 135). Yet, in these latter parts of his life, Pissarro painted more cityscapes than any other major Impressionist did in his entire career (Brettel xv), at the same time paying homage to the city and its factories rather than condemning them as we would expect. As with his earlier factory paintings, Pissarro's critics consider his urban factory paintings to be negative political statements about the industrialization of France, failing to see the aesthetic value which he placed upon the cities, failing to see that his comment regarding industry and urbanity is indeed positive. Instead of painting them as corrupt, as killers of men's souls, as his anarchist politics would lead us to assume, his urban paintings of factories are full of motion, action, life, and in the middle of it all, industry. As such, Pissarro is one of the few painters who recognizes the creative, life-giving aspects of industry, not the destructive, in complete contradiction to his philosophical beliefs.