Firedamp

This sculpture depicts the tragic subject and based on an event that occurred in March 1887, when in the mine of La Boule, in the centre of the Borinage, a gas explosion caused the death of over one hundred workers. Meunier went to the place of the disaster, making many drawings and sketches. The sculpture of the mother identifying her dead son stirs associations reaching from Michelangelo’s Pietà to contemporaneous news images. Meunier expressed the grief in the painfully stooped outline of the woman rather than in her features, contrasting her bent figure with the rigid, elongated corpse.