Das Eisenwalzwerk

Germany had just become a single empire in 1871, and its new strength ran on iron. Menzel travelled to a rail-rolling works at Koenigshuette, in Upper Silesia, in 1872 and spent weeks sketching the furnaces and the men who fed them. Almost nobody was painting factories then, certainly not at this scale. He shows the instant a glowing bar of iron is wrestled through the rollers, the workers braced against heat you can nearly feel, others off to the side washing and eating in the same shed. He gave it the subtitle Modern Cyclopes, after the giants of Greek myth who forged thunderbolts for the gods. The light in the whole picture comes almost entirely from the metal itself.