Herman Heijenbrock - Work in the printing press

This magnificent work (pastel) by Herman Heijenbrock (1871-1948) is titled *Work in the Printing Shop*. The dimensions are 47 x 63 cm / 72 x 88 cm (including frame).

Impressive work with history and a story! A beautiful eye-catcher in any interior! Beautiful frame; the pastel itself protected by a glass plate!

Heijenbrock is often called the painter of 'iron and fire'. Initially, he was a journalist and illustrator. After a trip to the Borinage in Belgium in 1898, he began painting the working man in a world of technology and machines. He found his motifs in mines, factories, ports, and iron foundries. He decided not to depict the bleak life of the workers, but the heroism of their work, stemming from a sacred belief in the progress that technology would bring to humanity.

After his training at the drawing academy in Rotterdam, he documented the development of heavy industry in many European countries during the first decades of the 20th century, enabled in part by his – happy – marriage to a wealthy academic. Heijenbrock worked on location in mines, blast furnaces, and factories. This compelled him to produce primarily pastels with a black background, as watercolor and oil paint are difficult to handle in those locations. He was therefore unique not only in his choice of subjects but also in the resulting working method.

This 'painter of light and labor' did not create his hundreds of oil paintings and pastels of industrial landscapes solely to produce beautiful works of art. He created the depictions of factories, mines, machines, and the role of the worker in the production process also to document his admiration for human labor power, aided by machines.

That social engagement and drive to document led to a unique depiction of production processes in the early twentieth century. The industrial painter was thus, besides being an artist, also an 'educator' who, through his work, sought to make man aware of his creative power without adhering to an ideological dogma. Heijenbrock, a self-taught man in technical and scientific fields, also wrote philosophical reflections on this.