Société des Artistes Indépendants
The painting seems to illustrate a line from one of van Gogh's favorite novels, "L'Assommoir" by Émile Zola: "a great forest of factory chimneys" filled the sky. The topic had been picked up by Impressionists, such as Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Armand Guillaumin, but van Gogh may have been most intrigued by a work he saw at the 1886 Société des Artistes Indépendants by Charles Angrand entitled "Terrains Vagues".