Constantin Meunier was a Belgian sculptor and painter. In his work he chose to depict industrial workers, dockers and miners, elevating them as icons of the industrial age. This figure portrays the proud, athletic figure of a dock labourer but it was also Meunier’s intention to show the alienation of the individual through labour. A first version in wax was exhibited in 1885 in Brussels at the Salon des XX and a plaster version at the National Society of Fine Arts, Paris in 1998 where it was received with enthusiastic praise “… never have we had such an intense figure, with such a tragic expression and touching, energy, crushing, suffering and resignation’.
Meunier was one of the main artists to be exhibited at the Paris based art dealer, Siegfrid Bing’s influential L’Art Nouveu exhibitions, held at the Grafton Galleries in London in the 1897 and 1899. Frank Brangwyn designed the posters for the exhibitions and possibly acquired this figure around the same time.
Formerly known as ‘Coal Heaver’ a bronze version of the statuette is illustrated in the article by Walter Shaw Sparrow ‘Constantin Meunier: The Artist of the Flemish Collieries’ in the Studio Vol. 11 July 1897 pp.75 – 86, illus. p.79. An identical plaster version (not coloured), with the title ‘Le Debardeur’, is illustrated in the review of the Antwerp exhibitiion in ‘Studio Talk’, The Studio Vol. 15 No 69 Dec 1898 pp.201 – 202 illus. p. 200.
