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The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes)
Adolph Menzel · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Adolph Menzel (1815–1905)
- Date
- 1872–1875
- Dimensions
- 158 x 254 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
The Iron Rolling Mill shows the interior of a huge steelworks in Silesia, where teams of workers manoeuvre a glowing iron bar through the rollers that will shape it into railway tracks, amid smoke, noise and blazing heat.
A closer look
Menzel spent weeks at the factory making over a hundred drawings. At the centre, a group of men with long tongs guides the white-hot iron, whose glare lights up their faces and the iron beams. All around, the life of the factory goes on: on the right, workers in the shadows eat their lunch from tin pails brought by a young woman; on the left, a man washes himself. It is one of the first great paintings of modern industrial labour, showing the workers neither as heroes nor victims, but as people in an overwhelming new world of machines.
