Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915

Thomas Anshutz (American, 1851–1912)
The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880
Oil on canvas; 17 x 23 7/8 in. (43.2 x 60.6 cm)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd (1979.7.4)

During one of his annual trips to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he had spent his teens, Anshutz sketched workers taking a break in the yard of a nail factory, the sort of dreary industrial setting from which most painters averted their eyes. He then painted the men frozen in classical poses derived from life-drawing instruction, which he had received as Thomas Eakins's student at the Pennsylvania Academy. The painting's subtle narrative has invited multiple interpretations. For example, in 1884 Procter & Gamble quoted the image in an advertisement for Ivory Soap by adding washtubs to the foreground. Other commentators have read in it a message of labor's toll upon the men or a celebration of relations between workers and employers. Recent scholars have considered it a nostalgic account of skilled laborers in the face of impersonal factory production and an emblem of rugged masculinity in the face of feminized late-nineteenth-century American culture.