La Carrière 1899

Maximilien Luce made this painting, La Carrière, with oil on canvas in France around the turn of the century. Luce, aligned with the Neo-Impressionists, used short brushstrokes of pure colour to build up the image of a stone quarry. The late nineteenth century was a time of rapid industrialisation and social change in France, and Luce was an avowed anarchist and socialist. So while this painting might appear at first to be a simple landscape study, it can also be read as a commentary on the social conditions of the time. We see workers toiling in a harsh environment, extracting stone from the earth. The quarry is perhaps a metaphor for the exploitation of the working class in industrial society. It presents us with a picture of progress extracted at a human cost. To understand the painting more fully, we could research the history of quarrying in France, as well as the social and political movements of the time. Only then can we appreciate the full depth of Luce's critique of the modern world.