When people think of van Gogh, they so immediately identify with Starry Night or Sunflowers, and they don’t know about the wealth of so-called lesser works that dot the globe. I wouldn’t call this a lesser work, so much as an experiment in composition: it’s very clearly done in a tri-band, which was done to delineate the subjects clearly. The sky is separated from the factory from the ground, and each gets its own focus and its own color scheme and treatment. It’s like having three paintings in one, in a way: he’s attempting to channel earlier landscape artists by using the three color system to foil us into believing a sense of scale and continuity, but instead, he’s given us three separate entities to study. The sky with its hues of grey, green, green, and blue bleeding together almost as if in a watercolor technique. The factory line, in a perfunctory pastel oil sketch riot of colors and lines that scream impressionism. And the grasses of rich greens, yellows, and golds with flecks of blue that reek of pointilism and grasping at the newest ideas. This painting is an experiment and it is successful.