Maximilien Luce (French, 1858-1941), "La Forge", ca. 1890, oil on canvas, signed, "Parke-Bernet Galleries Inc., New York" label en verso, 21-3/4" x 18-1/4". Framed. Provenance: Samuel Josefowitz Collection, Geneva; Sotheby's, London, April 30, 1969, lot 58; Sotheby's, London, October 17, 1990, lot 34; The Estate of Gary Baxter Webb, Houston, Texas. Illustrated: Bazetoux, Denise.

Catalogue de l'Oeuvre Peint, II. Paris: 1986. p. 232, no. 926. Born into a family of modest means to a railway clerk and a mother whose family was from peasantry origins, Luce always had a deep predilection for the working class. He began his artistic career as an engraver, before turning to painting full time in 1883, when employment opportunities for engravers became scarce, due to advancements in printmaking. He was introduced to the Neo-Impressionist group by fellow artist Camille Pissarro in 1887, and quickly adopted the Divisionist technique of color application in separate patches or dots, believing it achieved unprecedented luminosity. Luce's oeuvre, as a 1904 exhibition review in Art et Decoration declared, captures "the immense furnaces that ablaze the night violet; the flames of the street lights and carriages that flicker like stars on the streets; the life and work of the wharfs; London by fog and the Midi engorged by light at midday; these are the spectacles by which Mr. Maximilien Luce is engaged." Unlike the Impressionists, who nostalgically depicted a rural agrarian France in the wake of industrial change, Luce embraced it. Machinery, railways, factories and mines consumed his work at the turn of the century; he even made several trips to Belgium to paint the iron/steel plants, mines and blast furnace factories. Luce simultaneously celebrated proletarian toil and recoiled from the brutish conditions and physique it engendered. Machines, Corina Weidinger writes in her article on images on industry in Luce's paintings, were oppressive to workers in capitalism but essential for alleviating hard labor in a utopian anarchist society.

The painting offered here of a lone blacksmith, probably from the working-class faubourgs of Paris, epitomizes Luce's empathy and ambivalence toward the worker's plight. Though depicted in a spectacular array of fiery gold and amber that scintillates off the bricks in an unprecedented command of dots that few divisionist artists were able to achieve with flames, the blacksmith with his downcast eyes and powerful arms is still entombed in his own inferno. As Emile Verhaeren wrote in the preface to the catalogue for Luce's 1909 exhibition at Bernheim Jeune et Cie: "In this way you show us not only with the finery of your colors and lines fragments of the world that beauty appears to banish from its domain, but you also prove a talent as powerful, strong and fierce as you."

References: Corina Weidinger. "Fatigue, Machinisme, and Visual Spectacle in Maximilien Luce's L'Acierie." Nineteenth-Century World Wide: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Visual Culture 12:2 (2013): p. 2; Verhaeren, Emile. Exposition Luce chez MM. Bernheim Jeune et Cie. Paris: Moderne Imprimerie, 1909.