Atelier pour le travail mécanique du bois

This painting, which was displayed at the 1865 Salon (an art exhibition distinguished by the Academy of Fine Arts), shows the huge workshops of Jean-Louis Perin, future partner of the automobile-maker René Panhard, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine quarter. Beneath an immense skylight, employees use saws (right) or mortising machines (left) to work on wooden parts. Twenty years after Eugène Philippe's model of a car-wheel workshop, the use of machines had become widespread in increasingly big factories.