Usine de fabrication d'armement à Lyon : la forge

Usine de fabrication d'armement à Lyon: la forge of 1916 belongs to Vuillard's wartime commission to document French industrial war production — an exceptional subject for a painter whose entire career had been devoted to the intimate domestic interior, now confronting the forges and machinery of munitions manufacture. The French government commissioned artists during the First World War to document the industrial war effort, and Vuillard's commission to visit a munitions factory in Lyon placed him in an environment as far from his domestic territory as it was possible to imagine: the heat, noise, and physical scale of an armaments forge, its workers engaged in the most explicitly anti-domestic labor — the manufacture of weapons. His treatment of this industrial subject applied his intimist methods to a subject that resisted them: the forge's scale, its dramatic light effects, and its industrial character required formal responses quite different from his domestic program while remaining distinctively his own in their attention to the specific visual character of enclosed working spaces.

The forge's intense heat and light provide Vuillard with dramatic illumination quite unlike his typical domestic light sources. The glowing metal and workers' silhouettes create strong light-dark contrasts that give this industrial scene an almost dramatic character, with his canvas handling adapting his usual mat, considered touch to the more intense visual energy of the forge.