Interior of a Foundry

This is one of several works on the same theme by this artist. His signature and the date are cleverly incorporated into the molten metal being cast in the lower right hand corner. The region of Liège in Belgium, where Defrance spent most of his life and where he produced this picture, had been a centre of metal working for centuries and was an important industrial area by the later 18th century. The pair of well-dressed visitors on the left probably belong to the prosperous middle-class created by the Industrial Revolution. Defrance was certainly drawn to the subject by its dramatic lighting, but at the same time he appears to have been a man of radical political views who would have been attracted by this modern scene of creative enterprise.