The River Sambre in Charleroi

1896

Oil on canvas, 54.6 × 64.8 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Lit windows glow along a river and an arched bridge as night falls. The dot method, often used for sunny leisure, here records a working city.

The subject is a coal and steel town. Painters in the group's anarchist circle often turned to factories and workers, bringing industry into the movement's subject matter.
It dates from his second and most productive stay in Charleroi.
Look at the reflected lights, broken into vertical streaks on the dark water.
Deep blues and violets dominate, with small warm touches for the lamps.
Arthur G. Altschul, a Yale graduate, gave it to the university's gallery.

Charleroi lies in the Pays Noir, or Black Country, which the painter first visited in 1895, invited by Émile Verhaeren and Théo van Rysselberghe. He painted more than thirty canvases there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain