According to his daughter Helen, Henry Clay Frick collected pictures that he found “pleasant to live with.” A glance down this gallery supports this. But Goya's Forge, with its dark, vigorous brushstrokes, harsh realism, and working-class subject disrupts the serenity of its surroundings. The size of this painting—normally reserved for religious or mythological scenes—endows the image of backbreaking labor with a sense of monumentality. In composition, the work evokes the traditional depictions of the forge of Vulcan, here updated to the gritty reality of modern industrial Europe. For Frick, the steel magnate retired from his industrial ventures after the violent breaking of the Homestead Strike, the subject of this Spanish masterpiece must have had strong, if complex, resonance.

Little detracts from the raw power of the three workers arranged in a pyramidal composition around a red-hot sheet of molten metal. The gestures of the smiths complement one another. The energy of the figure closest to us rises upward from a powerful base of muscular legs through the hoisted arm and sledgehammer. His counterpart bows downward and forward, holding the sheet in place with tongs. A stooped old man holds bellows, just in between the two young men—a grim reminder of the inexorable toll of time and unrelenting labor.

The paint is laid on quickly in broad strokes with a crude power and vitality that underlie the expression of the work as a whole. Goya uses quite a dark palette for this work, a use of black that presages the artistic style of his final years—what is typically called his introspective “black period.”