Any one engrossed in the details may see how the workmen wandering homewards are clad in the garb of the modern proletariat, and how a manufacturing town of the present day with typical factory buildings lies stretched before us. But the first rapid, comprehensive glance conveys quite a different impression. The town looks like a Sodom and Gomorrha in rebellion against God, and is on the point of being chastised by fire from heaven. The procession of men appears to be a band of the damned which a hidden, mysterious abyss of hell, behind the bend in the road, has vomited. Near the causeway, uncanny depths seem to yawn, from which tongues of hell-flames leap up. It is a prophet’s vision, and the atmosphere of a saga. You fancy you have an illustration of the Inferno before you, but also a note from the formula according to which the painters and sculptors of the Middle Ages were wont to depict the Last Judgment. And the most remarkable thing is that this epic extension and enhancement of so banal an incident as the exodus of a shift of pitmen knocking off their work is by no means intended. The painter nowhere consciously works with a view to melodrama. He keeps, in all details, strictly to facts. It is only his perception that has made a canto of Dante out of a true copy of an everyday incident. At the sight of the flaming forges, smoking chimneys, and exhausted slaves working for hire, there came to him an inkling of the mighty forces of nature and society which are at work in the man- and horse-powers of a modern wholesale business, which fixed the choice and arrangement of elements in his picture, imprinted on it the demoniac feature, and rendered it a profound symbol of the history of a part of humanity. Jef Leempoels is one of the most interesting of contemporary Flemings in whom the exquisite artistic qualities of their mediæval forefathers and masters live again. Leempoels has the sturdy, homely truthfulness of these ancestors, their profound feeling, and speculative mind, which easily goes astray into the fantastic. He has their masterly draughtsmanship, and he only lacks their delight in colour and their gift of free, clear composition to rise entirely to their greatness.