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While his fellow-Impressionist Claude Monet was painting pleasure-boats on the Seine, Pissarro chose to depict a working river. The masts of two sailing barges and the smokestack of a steam-powered tug echo the tall chimney of a factory in the distance.

The 19th-century critic P. G. Hamerton accused Pissarro of having "so little objection to ugly objects that in one of his pictures the tower of a distant cathedral is nearly obliterated by a long chimney and the smoke that issues from it, whilst there are other long chimneys close to the cathedral, just as they might present themselves in a photograph. By this needless degree of fidelity, M. Pissarro loses one of the great advantages of painting."

In fact, Pissarro depicted "ugly objects" not because he was insensitive to beauty, but because he recognized that industry was an inescapable part of the modern landscape.