Les Terrils, Charleroi

Les Terrils, Charleroi (1896) is one of Luce's most celebrated paintings and a landmark of socially engaged Post-Impressionism. The terrils — the massive slag heaps produced by coal mining operations — dominate the landscape around Charleroi in the Hainaut province of Belgium, and Luce visited the region specifically to document the industrial and human realities of coal production. In 1895–1896, Charleroi was one of Europe's most intensive coal-producing areas, with a working population subjected to extreme physical hardship and labor exploitation. Luce's anarchist politics drove him toward industrial subjects: he wanted painting to acknowledge the hidden human cost of industrial modernity. The Charleroi paintings, of which several survive, depict the slag heaps as massive, almost sublime forms looming over small human figures — a compositional strategy that dramatizes the overwhelming scale of industrial capitalism. The works were exhibited in anarchist and socialist publications of the period, functioning as visual arguments about labor conditions. They remain among the most politically explicit landscapes in the French Post-Impressionist tradition.

The slag heaps are painted with a subdued palette of greys, ochres, and muted purples that conveys the colorless, suffocating character of the industrial landscape. Small worker figures establish scale against the massive mounds, while smoke and atmospheric haze are rendered through broken, overlapping strokes.