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James McBey
France at Her Furnaces, 1917
This print captures the workaday, backbreaking toil at the white-hot furnaces inside a munitions factory near Le Havre, a major port through which Allied troops and supplies moved during the war. The British government enacted a military draft in May 1916, assigning McBey to the Army Printing and Stationery Services offices in Normandy.
In the years immediately preceding the war, self-taught etcher McBey enjoyed critical success in London. Critics praised his etching of the Netherlands, Spain, and Morocco as building upon the pictorial legacy of British Etching Revival artists Seymour Haden and James McNeill Whistler. |