The first of these two articles looking at the reading of hammers, mallets and their kin in paintings covered their significance in mythology and religion. This sequel looks at their depiction as working tools.
As they date back to the Stone Ages, hammers remain associated with working in stone, and the job of stonemason.
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Widely known as The Stonemason’s Yard, and held to be among Canaletto’s finest paintings, his view of Campo S. Vidal and Santa Maria della Carità from about 1725 features fewer and larger figures than many of his later works. Most of its people are in the lower left corner, which is a hive of activity, as shown in the detail below.
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Caught in a patch of sunlight, on the right, a stonemason is splitting a large block of rock using a hammer and chisel.
The mason’s fine art equivalent is the sculptor, often signified by their hammers and mallets.
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Early in his career, Gustave Courbet planted a gaudily-dressed figure at the foot of some cliffs near his home town of Ornans, put a small mallet in his right hand and a chisel in the other, and painted The Sculptor (1845). The subject of this sculptor’s inattention is the emerging form of a woman in the rock just above his left knee, which is over a small pipe from which water is pouring into the stream.
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Just four years later, Courbet attained fame with his Stone Breakers (1849), sadly destroyed in 1945 as a result of Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany. One of the surviving images of this painting is of sufficient quality to give an idea of what it must have looked like when it was exhibited at the Salon in 1850, marking the dawn of Naturalism. The artist later explained that he encountered this group of men on the roadside one day, apparently when he was in Ornans. He felt they were so complete an expression of poverty that he was immediately inspired to paint them, and invited them to attend his studio the following morning.
Two men are working beside a rural road near Ornans, breaking rocks into smaller stones used to provide a surface for the road. Both their faces are obscured, giving them anonymity, and their clothing is badly worn, torn, and frequently patched. The man on the right kneels on one knee as he brings a long-handled hammer down to break a rock, while the other carries a large wicker basket of broken rocks. Like the many thousands of other such teams who would have been scattered around the roads of France at the time, they are living on the job, at the roadside, their pot and a large cooking spoon on a sheet at the far right. A later painting of another stonebreaker was made by John Brett in 1857-58, shown below.
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Jean-Léon Gérôme was also an accomplished sculptor, and includes a hammer at the foot of his Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) to point out that this is a statue coming to life.
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A blacksmith is mentioned in William Shakespeare’s play King John, and is shown at work in this 1771 print made of Edward Penny’s original painting “I saw a smith stand with his hammer thus…”
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Beating the blade of a scythe with a hammer is apparently still used as a method of sharpening it, as shown in Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s rustic painting of The Haymakers from 1887.
With the industrial revolution, hammers grew too large to be wielded by a man, and relied on first water- then steam-power.
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Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Iron Forge (1772) is one of his series of faithful portrayals of the small-scale technological advances of the day. It shows a group of workers forging a white-hot iron casting, using a tilt-hammer powered by a water-wheel. Also present is the wife and children of the iron-founder, stressing the family nature of these small forges at the time.
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A decade later, Pehr Hilleström recorded a visit to the Anchor-Forge at Söderfors. The Smiths Hard at Work (1782). As with many of these early glimpses of new industries, his painting shows a well-dressed group of visitors, at the right, who are watching the workmen in the centre. Söderfors is in Uppsala, on the east coast of Sweden, and seems to have been an early industrial site.
Hammers also make an appearance in settings where their use may be unexpected.
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Ilya Repin’s painting of The Surgeon Evgueni Vasilievich Pavlov in the Operating Theatre (1888) shows an eminent Russian surgeon at work in the operating theatre, wielding a hammer and chisel on an anaesthetised patient’s leg. The painting is dominated by the dazzling white operating gowns of those at work, and the slightly less intense pale blue of the surrounding walls.
For its industrial use, the hammer became incorporated with the sickle, representing agricultural labour, as a symbol of working people, and socialism. It also appears in one unusual ‘problem picture’.
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José Uría’s After a Strike from 1895 revolves around a strike and its violent consequence. The scene is a large forge apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police (or military), and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, probably the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort another younger woman.
This appears to show the tragic consequence of the violence resulting from a strike. Was the deceased trying to continue working when his colleagues had withdrawn their labour in a dispute, then came to blows with one of them, and was struck and killed? Although in a sense the story has a form of resolution, it’s unclear how it got there, and open to speculation on the part of the viewer. But I suspect that it was the hammer that got him.