Meditate with Maximilien Luce (1858-1941)

Tenchairs, terrassiers, workers: the painter Maximilien Luce likes to represent the world of “prolos”, as he calls them. He himself is of an independent character, close to anarchist circles, refusing the official salons of the capital.

Trained at the Impressionist school, he develops pictorial resonances both in the art of landscapes and in the representation of an urban world in deep transformation. Because at the end of the 19th century, the manufacturer’s impulse impulses by the Third Republic will upset all the geography and the appearances of Paris. Avenues are pierced and well -aligned bourgeois buildings. The walks, to improve movements and bring light into the medieval and unsanitary alleys of old Paris, multiply.

But the factories and their vaporous smoke appear on the horizon as a new pattern for the painter. Here, on the quays of the Seine, it is a tiraudes that is in action. This mast is a machine with very old origins. It is used to threaten by threshing the piles intended to serve as foundations for future buildings, or the palplanches which ensure the sealing of a construction zone.

A palanqué of shirtless workers is thus busy raising the “sheep”, the heavy metal piece which, relaxed, will fall on the stake to drive it. Some shovels are also thrown on the side.

And on the other, workers, exhausted by this harm of convict, rest a little. The blue shadow of standing men lengthens in the hole to spill further: the end of the day is approaching, salutary. The painter pays tribute to all these workers who, yesterday and today, are the worn hands and the overtime of our desires of glory and power.