Usine de fabrication d'armement à Lyon : les tours

The companion to the forge painting, this 1916 canvas at the Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes depicts the lathe section of the same Lyon armaments factory—workers at turning machines producing military components. Where the forge was defined by heat and dramatic light, the lathe section offered a more diffuse industrial environment of repetitive mechanical labor. Together, the two factory paintings represent Vuillard's most sustained engagement with industrial modernity, a world entirely at odds with the bourgeois domestic interiors that defined his artistic identity.

The lathe machines create regular geometric rhythms across the factory floor, and Vuillard uses this mechanical repetition as a structural element analogous to the decorative patterns he found in wallpaper and upholstery. The workers among the machines are treated with the same observational care as the Parisian women he had painted for decades.